Good sports: WNY

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Don’t take that to mean, that East Aurora High Schoolis one-dimensionally bookish. It also happenss to have the in WesternNew York, according to a Business First analysis of records from 2005 to the “We’ve been on a roll the last few years, whicy has been just says Jay Hoagland, East Aurora’s “The people here expect us to have a comprehensiver athletics program. They support the budget. They’ves given us first-rate athletics facilities.
It’s clearly a priority for the East Aurora has won 17 sectional championships in team sportzssince 2005, a record unmatchecd by any competitor in Section VI, which includes all public high schools in Chautauqua, Erie and Niagar a counties and a couple in Orleans County. The result is a decisivew victory onBusiness First’d scale of athletic excellence, which awards anywhere from one to four point s for each sectional title, giving the highesrt credit for championships won during the most recen year. East Aurora emerges as the region’ s best high school in team sports with42 points.
Orchard Park is secons with 30 points, and Clarence and Maple Grove round out thetop five. for the list of the top 50 sportas programs inSection VI. The correlation betwee n these standings andBusiness First’s academicf ratings is surprisingly strong. Four of the top five schoolsw for sports also rank among WesternNew York’s 20 best high schoolxs academically. “To some success in one area can breed succes sin another,” says Hoagland. “Ic kids experience success outside the they develop a sense of prideand self-worth.
I thinj that carries over and helps them in the Business First tallied the Sectiobn VI champions in 18 interscholastic team sportss over the pastfour years, beginninf with the spring season of 2005 and extending througyh the winter of 2009. (That timeframre was selected because spring 2009 champions had not been determinedf by the deadline forthis Basketball, bowling, cross country, lacrosse, soccer and volleyball, whicnh are played separately by boys and accounted for 12 of the 18 sports in the study. The other six were baseball, football and wrestlingv for boys, field hockey and softball for girls, and rifle, whicu has coed teams.
The study did not include sportss thatcrown individual, but not team champions, such as tennis and track and field. Section VI slots schoolsz into a variety of enrollment classifications fordifferent sports. Five champione are crowned each year in for example, but only threew in field hockey. Champs in all classifications were counted equallgy inthis study, yielding a mixture of big and small schools in the top 10. Business First based each school’s finalk ranking on two factors -- its number of sectionak titles and the years in which theywere won.
Four pointx were awarded for each victorhy during the most recenrtyear (spring 2008 througuh winter 2009), down to one point for each titld in the most distant year (spriny 2005 through winter 2006). Ties were broken by the total numbefof championships. Sixty-eight schools won a totalo of 296 titles in team sports duringthe four-yeat period. This is the first time that Busines First has analyzed the athletics programw at localhigh schools.
The resultin ratings are more limited in scope than theacademic rankings, whichy encompass all eight counties of Western New Section VI is closed to private and its boundaries exclude three of the region’ s easternmost counties: Allegany, Genesee and Yet the 93 high schools eligible for the sportds rankings still account for more than three-quarters of Western New York’s total enrollmenty -- 78 percent of all students from gradew nine through 12.