North Dakota’s High School Sports Divisions Have All Changed.

I'm sure this is just the tip of an Eastern North Dakota conspiracy created solely to allow the East to occasionally win something other than hockey.

Introducing the following divisions for ND High School football 2021.

Everything changes.  Old duffers like me can pine for the days of Class-A, Class-B, and 9-Man football divisions in the state. Really old duffers can pine for the single class football years.  KFYR TV's Lee Timmerman has the one class league being the state standard for over 60 years ending in 1974.

Class A, Class B, and 9 Man seemed like the sweet spot to me.

That three division set up then ran over twenty years from 1975 until 1997 when a fourth division was added to even out the competition.  Divisions then became Triple-A, Double-A, Class-A, and 9-Man.

2021 it's time for a major overhaul!

2021 now brings us four newly developed divisions- Division 11AA with four Fargo/West Fargo teams representing the East and six Bismarck, Mandan, Minot, and Williston teams representing the West.  Next, there's the all new Division 11A which has 6 teams from the East and five from the West.   The third new entry is Division 11B, which used to be B, so this one sounds right to me. The fourth and final is Division 9B.

There's still 4 divisions but the names have changed and the schools in some divisions have drastically changed.  Divisions are driven by the number of male enrollments in the schools with the option for schools to "opt up" or "opt down".   For example, Shanley decided to "opt up" to play with the big schools while Dickinson decided to "opt down" to avoid them big schools.

To see where your favorite school team falls under these new designations- please find the entire NDHSAA Football Divisions and Enrollments breakdown right here.

Maybe it's not an evil Eastern North Dakota conspiracy, but we'd all welcome your take on why it all went down.