Good sports: WNY

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Don’t take that to mean, that East Aurora High Schoolis one-dimensionally It also happens to have the in Western New York, accordinv to a Business First analysis of records from 2005 to the “We’ve been on a roll the last few which has been just says Jay Hoagland, East Aurora’s “The people here expect us to have a comprehensivw athletics program. They support the They’ve given us first-rate athleticzs facilities. It’s clearly a priority for the community.
” East Aurora has won 17 sectional championshipds in team sports since a record unmatched by any competitor inSectionb VI, which includes all public high schools in Cattaraugus, Erie and Niagara counties and a couple in Orleana County. The result is a decisive victory onBusinessd First’s scale of athletic which awards anywhere from one to four pointsw for each sectional title, giving the highest credit for championships won during the most recent year. East Aurorz emerges as the region’s best high schoopl in team sports with42 points.
Orchard Park is second with 30 points, and Randolph, Clarences and Maple Grove round out the top for the list of the top 50 sports programs inSectiohn VI. The correlation between these standingw andBusiness First’s academic ratings is surprisinglyy strong. Four of the top five schools for sports also rank amonfg WesternNew York’s 20 best high schools academically. “To some success in one area can breed successin another,” says “If kids experience success outside the they develop a sense of pridee and self-worth. I think that carries over and helpsx them inthe classroom.
” Business First tallied the Section VI champions in 18 interscholastic team sportw over the past four beginning with the spring season of 2005 and extendin g through the winter of 2009. (That timefram was selected because spring 2009 championsx had not been determined by the deadlinew forthis publication.) Basketball, bowling, cross country, lacrosse, soccee and volleyball, which are playex separately by boys and girls, accounted for 12 of the 18 sport in the study. The other six were football and wrestling for field hockey and softball for and rifle, which has coed teams.
The studyu did not include sports thatcrown individual, but not team champions, such as tennis and track and field. Sectionb VI slots schools into a variety of enrollmenyt classifications for different Five champions are crowned each year in for example, but only thre e in field hockey. Champs in all classificationa were counted equally inthis study, yieldingt a mixture of big and small schools in the top 10. Businesz First based each school’s final ranking on two factors -- its numbere of sectional titles and the years in which theywere won.
Four pointds were awarded for each victorg during the most recentyear (spring 2008 throughj winter 2009), down to one point for each titler in the most distany year (spring 2005 throughg winter 2006). Ties were broken by the totak numberof championships. Sixty-eight schools won a total of 296 titlez in team sports duringthe four-year This is the first time that Businesxs First has analyzed the athletics programss at local high schools. The resultingf ratings are more limited in scope than theacademicv rankings, which encompass all eight counties of Westerbn New York.
Section VI is closed to private schools, and its boundaries excludes three ofthe region’s easternmost Allegany, Genesee and Wyoming. Yet the 93 high schools eligiblr for the sports rankings still accountt for morethan three-quarters of Western New York’ds total enrollment -- 78 percentr of all students from grades nine througjh 12.