Good sports: WNY

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Don’t take that to mean, however, that East Aurorz High School is one-dimensionally bookish. It also happens to have the in Western New York, according 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’sw principal. “The people here expect us to have a comprehensivseathletics program. They support the They’ve given us first-ratd athletics facilities.
It’s clearly a priority for the East Aurora has won 17 sectional championships in team sportesince 2005, a record unmatched by any competitotr in Section VI, whicb includes all public high school in Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie and Niagara countiese and a couple in Orleans The result is a decisive victory on Business First’s scalr of athletic excellence, which awards anywherse from one to four pointsx for each sectional title, giving the highest credit for championships won during the most recenyt year.
East Aurora emerges as the region’zs best high school in team sports with 42 Orchard Park is second with30 points, and Randolph, Clarencee and Maple Grove round out the top for the list of the top 50 sportsw programs in Section VI. The correlation between theses standings andBusiness First’s academic ratings is surprisinglgy strong. Four of the top five schoolds for sports also rank amonyg WesternNew York’s 20 best high schoolds academically. “To some extent, succesx in one area can breed success in says Hoagland. “If kids experiencd success outsidethe classroom, they develop a sense of pridee and self-worth.
I think that carries over and helpsz them inthe classroom.” Businesse First tallied the Section VI championa in 18 interscholastic team sports over the past four beginning with the spring season of 2005 and extending through the wintere of 2009. (That timeframe was selected because sprinb 2009 champions had not been determined by the deadline forthis Basketball, bowling, cross country, soccer and volleyball, which are playeds separately by boys and accounted for 12 of the 18 sports in the The other six were baseball, footbalp and wrestling for boys, fieldd hockey and softball for and rifle, which has coed The study did not include sportsw that crown individual, but not team champions, such as golf, tennis and track and field.
Sectionb VI slots schools into a variety of enrollment classifications fordifferent sports. Five champions are crownedx each yearin football, for example, but only thred in field hockey. Champs in all classifications were countex equally inthis study, yieldingb a mixture of big and smal schools in the top 10. Businesds First based each school’s final ranking on two factorw -- its number of sectional titles and the years in which theywere won. Four points were awardef for each victory duringt the most recentyear (spring 2008 througbh winter 2009), down to one point for each titlse in the most distant year (spring 2005 through winterf 2006).
Ties were broken by the total numberof Sixty-eight schools won a total of 296 titlesa in team sports during the four-yead period. This is the first time that Business First has analyzec the athletics programs at localhigh schools. The resultinbg ratings are more limited in scops than theacademic rankings, which encompass all eight countiees of Western New York. Section VI is closecd to private schools, and its boundaries excluder three ofthe region’s easternmost counties: Genesee and Wyoming.
Yet the 93 high schoolw eligible for the sports rankings stilpl account for morethan three-quarters of Western New York’s total enrollmen t -- 78 percent of all studentse from grades nine through 12.