Berkshire County High School Sports Teams Merging into PVIAC
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — When Berkshire County high school student-athletes return for the start of fall sports practice in a couple of weeks, many will be preparing for a whole new ball game.
The Berkshire County League with its familiar North and South Divisions for sports like soccer and volleyball in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball, softball and lacrosse in the spring are a thing of the past.
Starting this fall, the former Berkshire County League schools will be incorporated into the myriad leagues of the Pioneer Valley Interscholastic Athletic Conference.
The 10 Berkshire County schools' administration decided unanimously in the winter of 2020 to seek a merger with the much larger PVIAC, home to several dozen schools in Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin Counties plus McCann Tech in North Adams.
The decision was based primarily on a goal of finding competitive leagues for the student-athletes at the Berkshire County schools, Pittsfield Public Schools Athletic Director Jim Abel said this week.
"Based on the trends we've seen in recent years, [competitive balance] was one of the biggest challenges in Berkshire County," Abel said. "The biggest thing was being able to fill a schedule that offers competitive parity and a good experience for our student-athletes.
"Traditionally, this sort of thing goes in cycles, but now we're at a crossroads where it's an unfavorable trend we don't see reversing any time soon: We have one or two schools who are tremendously competitive in a given sport, one or two who are really non-competitive and three or four middle of the road schools. It's different schools from sport to sport, but we don't see that trend changing any time soon."
The solution, the athletic directors decided, was to find a new home in the PVIAC, where teams are grouped into leagues for four-year schedule cycles based on finding that competitive balance. And the schools are not locked into one league across several sports; in theory, a school's "league games" in soccer may be against an entirely different set of schools than the same school will play in basketball season.
And it means that county location plays a much smaller role in determining what league you're in. While the PVIAC attempts to preserve local rivalries in its league designations, competitive balance is also a factor.
It is a move that Berkshire County's high school football teams made several years ago. Starting this fall, most of the "team" sports (as opposed to sports like cross country or tennis) follow suit.
For girls soccer, Berkshire County's 11 schools are spread among five different league: Pittsfield and Wahconah will be in the Kurty/Fielding; Monument Mountain and Lenox will be in the Central; Hoosac Valley and Mount Greylock will be in the Grieve; Drury, Taconic, Lee and Mount Everett will be in the Pioneer-South; McCann Tech will be in the Tri-County.
In boys soccer, the county's 10 teams (Lee does field a varsity boys soccer team), will be distributed among four leagues: Pittsfield, Monument Mountain and Mount Greylock in the Churchill; Lenox, Wahconah and Mount Everett in the Moriarty; and Drury, Hoosac Valley, McCann Tech and Taconic in the Bi-County.
In volleyball, Wahconah will be in the Northern League, with no other Berkshire County teams. Lenox and Mount Greylock are in the Southern League. Monument Mountain, Mount Everett and Taconic are in the Central League. Lee and Pittsfield are in the Western League.
In each case, the Berkshire County schools will represent a minority of the total number of schools in their six-, seven- or eight-team leagues, meaning that the majority of their league games will be played against Pioneer Valley foes.
Abel acknowledged that greater travel times are a tradeoff.
"That's a conversation I just had with one of our soccer coaches," said Abel, who is in charge of the athletic departments at Pittsfield High and Taconic. "That's definitely one of the cons of this.
"The pro is … using Taconic soccer as an example of a school with a rather small participation level that has struggled for years, going up against the Lenoxes and the Pittsfield Highs and Wahconahs right off the bat — yes, it's convenient from a travel standpoint, but it's made it hard to establish a culture and a program to draw kids."
Abel said that the Berkshire County ADs agree that they will do everything possible to preserve key local rivalries with their teams' non-league — or "independent" — schedules.
In basketball, for example, Drury High School's boys are in the Hampshire South league, and Hoosac Valley's boys are in the Bi-County East in an alignment in effect through 2025, according to the PVIAC website.
Abel said there is nothing in the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association rules that would prohibit Drury and Hoosac Valley from scheduling two independent games against one another out of the handful of independent games their league schedules will allow.
"I'll give you another example: Pittsfield and Taconic are kind of ‘haves' and ‘have-nots' in soccer, but we still want them to play," Abel said. "We may not play twice, but we will play once.
"Longmeadow and East Longmeadow should play twice a year. Drury and Hoosac Valley should play twice a year."
Abel said that the idea of joining the PVIAC has been discussed in Berkshire County circles for at least as long as the 15 years he has been at Pittsfield and Taconic. The decision to pull the trigger on the merger in winter 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, was driven in part by the advent of a statewide tournament with the 2021-22 academic year.
For generations of high school athletes, teams in most sports have competed in sectional tournaments — West, Central, North and South — with the four winners playing in the state semi-finals.
The MIAA membership's decision to scrap the sectional tournament format and instead hold a 32-team state tournament — based totally on enrollment and not at all on geography — left schools in the 413 area code to wonder how they could preserve experiences like the Western Mass sectional for their student-athletes.
Abel said the plan now is for schools to schedule 16- to 18-game regular seasons, leaving a week (and two games) at the end for a Western Massachusetts championship under the auspices of the PVIAC that would conclude before the MIAA regular season cutoff date. In other words, for MIAA seeding purposes, the games played in the new Western Mass tournament would just be like any other regular season games.
What Abel could not answer this week is whether teams that do not make it into the newly created Western Mass tournaments will be able to play additional games during that week to fill out their regular season slates.
"I'm not 100 percent sure how those discussions last left off," he said. "That's the unknown. I'm still trying to get my arms around Maxpreps and the state tournament."
Maxpreps is the third-party power ranking service that the MIAA has employed to seed its statewide tournaments.
Abel said that while Berkshire County's move to the PVIAC is coinciding with the implementation of the new state tournament format, the county's ADs are not making the move to improve teams' chances of earning high seeds in those statewide tournaments.
"Our philosophy is not based on the goal of winning a state championship or scheduling based on a state championship," he said. "The goal is to provide the best experience possible, to provide competitive parity. Winning a Western Mass tournament is a great goal. Getting to a state title game is just icing on the cake.
"We've had an embarrassment of riches the last few years with Taconic baseball and Taconic basketball and Hoosac Valley basketball. But that's not the norm. … We've been going through a really good cycle. But despite that cycle, we're not manipulating our schedule based solely on getting into a state tournament."
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