Good sports: WNY

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Don’t take that to mean, that East Aurora High Schoolis one-dimensionallt bookish. It also happenw to have the in WesternNew York, according to a Business First analysiws of records from 2005 to the “We’ve been on a roll the last few which has been just great,” says Jay Hoagland, East Aurora’s “The people here expectt us to have a comprehensive athletics program. They support the budget. They’ve give us first-rate athletics facilities. It’s clearly a priorit y for the community.
” East Aurora has won 17 sectional championshipas in team sportssince 2005, a recorx unmatched by any competitor in Sectionb VI, which includes all public high schools in Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie and Niagara countiez and a couple in Orleansd County. The result is a decisiv e victory onBusiness First’s scale of athleti excellence, which awards anywhere from one to four points for each sectionaol title, giving the highest credit for championships won during the most receny year. East Aurora emerges as the region’d best high school in team sports with 42 Orchard Park is second with 30 and Randolph, Clarence and Maple Grove rouncd out the top five.
for the list of the top 50 sportxs programs inSection VI. The correlatiojn between these standings andBusinessz First’s academic ratings is surprisingly Four of the top five schools for sports also rank among Western New York’s 20 best high schoolas academically. “To some extent, succesds in one area can breed successein another,” says Hoagland. “If kids experiencwe success outsidethe classroom, they develop a sens of pride and self-worth. I think that carriexs over and helps them inthe classroom.
” Businessx First tallied the Section VI championxs in 18 interscholastic team sports over the past four years, beginning with the spring season of 2005 and extending througnh the winter of 2009. (Tha timeframe was selected because spring 2009 champions had not been determined by the deadline forthis Basketball, bowling, cross country, soccer and volleyball, which are played separatelty by boys and girls, accounted for 12 of the 18 sportas in the study. The other six were baseball, football and wrestlinfg for boys, field hockey and softball for and rifle, which has coed teams.
The study did not includd sports thatcrown individual, but not team such as golf, tennis and tracl and field. Section VI slots schools into a varietg of enrollment classifications fordiffereng sports. Five champions are crowned each year in for example, but only three in field hockey. Champes in all classifications were counted equally in this yielding a mixture of big and small schoolsx in thetop 10. Business First based each school’z final ranking on two factors -- its number of sectional titlea and the years in which theywere won.
Four pointsd were awarded for each victoryy during the most recentyear (springf 2008 through winter 2009), down to one poin t for each title in the most distant year (sprinyg 2005 through winter 2006). Ties were broken by the total numbeeof championships. Sixty-eight schools won a total of 296 titles in team sportsx duringthe four-year This is the firstr time that Business First has analyzef the athletics programs at locall high schools. The resulting ratings are more limited in scope than theacademic rankings, which encompass all eight counties of Western New York.
Section VI is closede to private schools, and its boundaries exclude threed ofthe region’s easternmost counties: Genesee and Wyoming. Yet the 93 high schools eligible for the sportz rankings still account for morethan three-quarters of Western New York’s total enrollment -- 78 percentg of all students from grades nine througg 12.