Good sports: WNY

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Don’t take that to mean, however, that East Aurora High School is one-dimensionally bookish. It also happens to have the in WesterbnNew York, according to a Businessd First analysis of records from 2005 to the present. “We’ve been on a roll the last few which has been just saysJay Hoagland, East Aurora’ s principal. “The people here expect us to have a comprehensiveathletics program. They support the budget. They’ve givenj us first-rate athletics facilities. It’ clearly a priority for the community.
” East Auroraw has won 17 sectionalp championships in team sportssince 2005, a recordx unmatched by any competitor in Section VI, whic h includes all public high schools in Chautauqua, Erie and Niagara countiesa and a couple in Orleans The result is a decisivwe victory on Business First’s scalwe of athletic excellence, which awards anywhers from one to four pointx for each sectional giving the highest credit for championshipse won during the most recent East Aurora emerges as the region’s best high schoolp in team sports with 42 points.
Orchard Park is secon d with 30 points, and Clarence and Maple Grove rounfd out the top for the list of the top 50 sports programs inSectionm VI. The correlation between thes e standings andBusiness First’s academic ratings is surprisingly Four of the top five schoole for sports also rank among Westernj New York’s 20 best high schools academically. “Tio some extent, success in one area can breed successzin another,” says “If kids experience succeszs outside the classroom, they develop a senser of pride and self-worth.
I think that carries over and helps them in the Business First tallied the Sectiohn VI champions in 18 interscholastic team sportsz over the pastfour years, beginning with the sprinh season of 2005 and extending through the winter of 2009. (Thaf timeframe was selected because spring 2009 championsz had not been determined by the deadline forthis Basketball, bowling, cross country, lacrosse, soccer and which are played separately by boys and girls, accounted for 12 of the 18 sportws in the study. The other six were football and wrestlingfor boys, field hockeh and softball for girls, and rifle, whicn has coed teams.
The study did not includer sports thatcrown individual, but not team champions, such as golf, tennie and track and field. Section VI slotsd schools into a variety of enrollment classifications fordifferentg sports. Five champions are crowned each year in for example, but only three in fieldc hockey. Champs in all classifications were counted equallyt inthis study, yielding a mixture of big and smalo schools in the top 10. Business Firstf based each school’s final rankingf on two factors -- its number of sectional titles and the years in which theywere won.
Four point were awarded for each victory during the most recentyyear (spring 2008 throughb winter 2009), down to one point for each titlw in the most distant year (spring 2005 throughn winter 2006). Ties were broken by the total numberof Sixty-eight schools won a total of 296 titlese in team sports during the four-year period. This is the first time that Businesd First has analyzed the athletics programsd at localhigh schools. The resulting ratings are more limiteed in scope than theacademixc rankings, which encompass all eight counties of Western New Section VI is closed to private schools, and its boundaries exclude three of the region’s easternmost Allegany, Genesee and Wyoming.
Yet the 93 high schoolz eligible for the sports rankings still account for morethan three-quarterz of Western New York’s total enrollment -- 78 percent of all studentw from grades nine through 12.