All eyes in the Texas high school sports world were fixed on the same thing Thursday morning: the biennial announcement of the University Interscholastic League’s realignment and reclassification.
Every two years, the UIL, the governing body of sports, music, and academic competitions in Texas schools, reorganizes every participating school in the state based on enrollment and location.
“With UIL realignment, you can make a real argument that it is the biggest day of the Texas high school football calendar every two years,” said Greg Tepper, managing editor of ‘Dave Campbell’s Texas Football.’ “It is the only day that impacts all 1,250-some UIL Texas high school football teams. Every one of them finds out their fate at 9 a.m. on Thursday at the same time.”
2024-2026 UIL REALIGNMENT
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For the uninitiated, you can think of what will happen Thursday like the annual ‘selection Sunday’ ahead of the NCAA basketball tournament, the day when the brackets that most people are familiar with get released.
The major difference, however, is that instead of organizing 68 teams for a single tournament that lasts about one month, UIL realignment is an effort to organize more than 1,200 Texas high schools across six classifications of size (from Class 1A up to 6A) for both regular and postseason competition for the next two years.
Tepper stressed that the stakes are high every time the UIL makes this realignment for several reasons, not the least of which is that the decision affects not only the once-a-week football games but also the multiple-days-a-week basketball and volleyball games. That has a significant impact on travel time for student-athletes, and the travel budget for the school districts.
“I think when realignment comes out there is this tendency to look at your school and say, ‘Oh, that is a good draw for my school, it is a bad draw for my school, or somewhere in the middle.’ But you have to remember that all of these pieces have to fit into place. It is the UIL’s job to take more than 1,200 schools and divide them up into relatively similar sizes, and then divide them up relatively geographically close to one another, and that is a hard thing to do.”
Thursday’s announcement of the biennial University Interscholastic League reclassification and realignment will affect the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years.
