For the first time in two decades, the Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) has added two sports to its list of sports that they sponsor a postseason tournament. Plus they’ll be expanding one sport to include an overall team state champion.
On Thursday the MHSAA announced that Boys Volleyball, and Girls Field Hocky will be added as two of the sports they will have a tournament and state champion starting with the 2025-26 school year. Girls Field Hockey will be played in the fall, while boys volleyball will be played during the spring.
Many schools have had boys volleyball club teams, but there was enough interest to add it as a full varsity sport. The same with girls field hockey. A girls sport had to be added for the MHSAA to be in compliance with Title IX.
The other new state championship is in the already established sport for girls wrestling, which the MHSAA already offers an individual state tournament. The MHSAA will now award a team state championship to the school that has the best performance by their athletes at the Individual Tournament as well. Calculating a team score based on the performance during individual matches. While most wrestling programs do have girls on their teams, there hasn’t been as of yet, enough girls to fill an entire team.
In other changes, staring with the 2024-25 school year, the state tournament for boys and girls basketball and boys and girls soccer will be fully seeded. Previously, only the top two seeds were seeded, but the full bracket will be seeded according the their Michigan Power Ranking (MPR) rankings.
Football classifications will be changing in 2025-26 as well. The MHSAA has now put the cap on Division 8 schools at 250 students and below. With more and more small schools changing over to 8-player football, those small schools that did decide to continue participating in traditional 11-player football often found themselves playing against much larger schools, who were in Division 8 only because of the fewer number of small schools playing, and the equal distribution of teams with higher enrollments above them. The MHSAA will have schools with 250 students and fewer, and playing 11-player football will be Division 8, then all of the remaining 11-player football schools will be divided equally in to 7 divisions.
