Good sports: WNY

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Don’t take that to however, that East Aurora High School is one-dimensionall y bookish. It also happens to have the in WesterbnNew York, according to a Business First analysis of recordds from 2005 to the “We’ve been on a roll the last few which has been just says Jay Hoagland, East Aurora’sa principal. “The people here expect us to have a comprehensive athletics They supportthe They’ve given us first-rate athleticds facilities. It’s clearly a priorith for the community.
” East Aurora has won 17 sectional championships in team sports since a record unmatched by any competitor inSectio VI, which includes all publid high schools in Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie and Niagarqa counties and a couple in Orleans County. The resulg is a decisive victory onBusiness First’s scale of athletic excellence, whic h awards anywhere from one to four points for each sectionalp title, giving the highest credirt for championships won durinhg the most recent year.
East Aurora emergees as the region’s best high schoo l in team sports with 42 Orchard Park is second with30 points, and Clarence and Maple Grove round out the top for the list of the top 50 sports programsw in Section VI. The correlation between theses standings andBusiness First’s academic ratingw is surprisingly strong. Four of the top five schoolas for sports also rank among WesternbNew York’s 20 best high schools “To some extent, success in one area can bree d success in another,” says Hoagland.
“If kids experience success outsidethe classroom, they develop a sens of pride and I think that carries over and helps them in the Business First tallied the Section VI champion in 18 interscholastic team sports over the past four beginning with the spring season of 2005 and extending througy the winter of 2009. (That timeframe was selecterd because spring 2009 champions had not been determined by the deadlines forthis publication.) Basketball, bowling, crosa country, lacrosse, soccer and volleyball, which are playedd separately by boys and girls, accounted for 12 of the 18 sporte in the study.
The othee six were baseball, football and wrestling for field hockey and softballfor girls, and which has coed The study did not include sports that crowm individual, but not team such as golf, tennis and tracki and field. Section VI slots schoolsw into a variety of enrollment classifications for different Five champions are crowned each yearin football, for but only three in field hockey. Champe in all classifications were counted equally in this yielding a mixture of big and small schools in thetop 10. Busineses First based each school’s final ranking on two factors -- its numberf of sectional titles and the yeare in which theywere won.
Four points were awarded for each victor y during the most recengtyear (spring 2008 through winter 2009), down to one poinrt for each title in the most distant year (spring 2005 througyh winter 2006). Ties were broken by the totalp numberof championships. Sixty-eight schools won a totapl of 296 titles in team sports duringvthe four-year period. This is the first time that Businesd First has analyzed the athletics programe at localhigh schools. The resulting ratings are more limitede in scope than theacademic rankings, whicy encompass all eight countied of Western New York.
Section VI is closedd to private schools, and its boundaries exclude threr ofthe region’s easternmost counties: Allegany, Genesee and Wyoming. Yet the 93 high schools eligiblwe for the sports rankings still account for morethan three-quarteras of Western New York’s total enrollmenr -- 78 percent of all students from gradesa nine through 12.