The Winnipeg High School Football League (WHSFL) and its teams will see significant changes for the upcoming fall season.
The A, AA, and AAA divisions will be replaced with AAAA and AAA. The decision was made to keep alignment with other MHSAA (Manitoba High School Athletics Association) sports.
The AAAA division will feature four divisions based on geographical locations. The SRSS (Steinbach Regional Secondary School) Sabres are in the southeast division along with Dakota Collegiate, Kelvin High School, Vincent Massey Collegiate and Grant Park High School. This will make establishing rivalries easier, and there will also be opportunities for crossover games against other AAAA teams.
Sabres football coordinator Jamie Peters is pleased with the decisions and says it is “really good for the sport of football.”
“I was on the committee that proposed this proposal towards the league, and it's actually been something similar to what I've been trying to push for since I think 2014 or 2015,” Peters explains. “I'm a big believer in starting with bigger pools, having more teams face the elite competition in the league to see what the best of the best looks like and then pairing down heading into different bowl games or different playoff brackets for postseason play.”
In previous seasons, Peters and the committee would base playoff brackets and rankings on what’s on paper.
“I love the ability of having games decide where people rank as opposed to fighting in June and deciding on numbers on a sheet being like, ‘Hey, this is where we think we are based on last year, and these players and math,” he says. “I think the older tiering formula worked pretty well, but it was always hard to come up with three or four division lines with just numbers on a paper, whereas now we have two lines, and now we can kind of let games tier themselves.”
Moving forward, they will attempt to emulate the college football system. They will have championships and a variety of bowl games, allowing lower-ranked teams to compete and receive exposure.
“We're trying to push to find what's the best way that we can make equitable competition. With that comes things like this. We usually lock in for three-year windows of a new thing to kind of get a feel for how it goes,”
Finally, he says he is “super excited” to try the new model out. The changes will come into effect for the fall 2023 season.
With files from Clayton Dreger.