NIAA has new rubric system for alignment purposes

The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association has a new formula to measure high school athletic programs.

The new system will be used to measure a high school’s sports programs performance so that an educated decision can be made on what level the program is at for the next alignment, which is scheduled for the 2018-19 season.

NIAA assistant director, Donnie Nelson, plans to introduce the system at the summer board meeting on June 19. He is also the author of the new system.

“We still have a whole season to go through before anything is decided,” he said. “We have a completely new point system that took 6.5 days for me to complete. We won’t be using a threshold anymore.”

The new system does away with the “threshold” which was used to send a team up or down to a new class. The old threshold was 149.

“That number is gone,” Nelson said. “We don’t even know what the number will be that we will use to determine which teams move up or down.”

The new numbering system was made to make things more equal Nelson said.

“The numbers are inflated to make things more equal, so now a team that wins the cross-country state title gets the same amount of points as the team that gets the football state title,” he said. “We needed to change that. It wasn’t like that before.”

Nelson said the final standing will be out after this upcoming fall season. He said football will be aligned separately from other sports.

Contact sports editor Vern Hee at vhee@pvtimes.com