The Virginia High School League’s (VHSL) latest realignment brings more change while also restoring familiar aspects of tournament and postseason play to Buckingham County, Cumberland and Prince Edward County high schools.

The biggest change will be the elimination of the conferences that were introduced in the 2013-14 school year. Additionally, each classification will once again be broken up into four regions after having been divided into two since 2013.

As for the postseason structure of individual sports, Buckingham Athletic Director Russ Gowin said he thinks football will be least affected by this new realignment. Power ratings will still dictate which teams advance to regional play.

It is quite a different story for the other sports, though.

“In other sports, most of the teams will be shot straight into the region and an all-inclusive regional tournament for, I think, all of the teams,” Gowin said.

In addition to conferences confusing matters while districts still exist, he said one of the reasons the VHSL might have elected to move away from the conferences was to eliminate the additional games that came with conference tournaments.

“It cut back a few extra games, and it helped the district tournament kind of have value again,” he said.

Prince Edward Athletic Director Rodney Kane also pointed to finances as being an issue, noting that many of the conferences were not making money off of their tournaments.

With the realignment comes a change in the terminology of classifications and regions. As listed on the VHSL website’s alignment page, classifications which for the past four years have been known as 1A through 6A are now called Class 1 through Class 6.

Cumberland is part of Class 1, and Buckingham and Prince Edward are part of Class 2.

The regions in each class will be known as A, B, C and D. Kane noted that Region A is east, Region B is north, Region C is central and Region D is west.

The name of the region that Cumberland occupies will change from 1A East to Class 1 Region B. For Prince Edward, it changes from 2A East to Class 2 Region A, and for Buckingham, it changes from 2A West to Class 2 Region C.

This latest VHSL alignment is expected to last for two years.

“We like what they’re doing right now, and we’ll see how it goes,” Gowin said, speaking for Buckingham. “We’ll see how it goes over the next year or two, and if there’s a lot of hiccups, then maybe the Virginia High School League will tweak it a little bit.”

Buckingham is one of 13 schools in its region, while Cumberland is one of 10 in its region and Prince Edward is one of 14 in its region.

Kane said he is going to take a wait-and-see attitude on the realignment.

As the VHSL allows regions to determine their own structure, he noted Class 2 Region A has divided itself in half to limit travel in the early rounds of the regional tournament.

“The way our region has chosen to implement this change, I don’t think it’s going to be a major change,” Kane said, “because we basically, while we’re not calling them conferences, we’ve kept the conference idea line in there with this seven on this side and seven on this side (concept).”

Cumberland Athletic Director Alfonso Bell said the realignment puts the Dukes in familiar territory.

“We’re back playing some of the teams that (we faced) when we were lined up in Conference 44,” he said, referring to the VHSL alignment that lasted from 2013-15. “So we’re familiar with the teams that we are in the region (with).”

He noted that not all of the schools in Cumberland’s new region offer all the available sports, including football. This will likely create a situation where all of the football teams in the region will make the regional tourney, regardless of power ratings.