As the dust settles from Monday’s UIL realignment, who wound up as the big winners and who were the big losers in the Greater Houston area?

Today, let’s pick ’em in Class 5A…

I think that if you are looking for winners, you need look no further than a little way out Highway 290 to the schools of Cy-Fair ISD.  The entire 10-team district will be relocated back in Region III next year as District 17-5A and, no matter which sport you pick, you can make a case that things just got a whole lot easier for whichever CFISD schools make it into the playoff brackets. 

With no disrespect intended toward the Alief ISD and Aldine ISD schools which will comprise neighboring 18-5A, all of the ‘Cy’ schools’ football and baseball coaches probably breathed a collective sigh of relief on Monday when they realized that they won’t see Round Rock schools in the first round and the likes of The Woodlands, College Park, any of the Klein ISD schools, etc., if they happen to survive that round.

Because of their geographic location on the northern outskirts of metropolitan Houston, the Cy-Fair schools always have to be prepared to go either to Region II or Region III at realignment time, depending on how the numbers fall out.  But, given their history of successes on the field, it would be hard to argue that they aren’t better off in Region III.

Cypress Woods made it to a football Region II championship game this past season, but Cy-Fair and Cypress Falls each made it at least that far on multiple occasions in Region III and the Golden Eagles played in a 5A Division 2 state championship game as a Region III representative in 2006.  Baseball seasons were a little tougher, thanks to the Katys, Bellaires and Kingwoods of the region, but Woody Champagne led his Cy-Fair Bobcats to a state baseball championship out of Region III back in 2007.

Conversely, if you feel like anyone got the short end of the stick, you’d have to pity Kingwood and Atascocita.  Not only do they get bumped from the friendly confines of Region III for Region II, but they also get ousted from their cozy surroundings in the Humble/Aldine district to be relocated into the Conroe ISD/Lufkin district. They’ll annually see The Woodlands, College Park, Oak Ridge, Conroe and Lufkin in district play. Ouch!

The move was basically unavoidable when it became obvious that Humble was not going to have the enrollment numbers to stay in 5A. (They join Humble ISD schools Kingwood Park and Summer Creek in 4A next year.)  And, because of their geographic location in relationship to the Conroe schools, the move was the most natural to make.

At the same time, District 14-5A, which was a small six-team district in recent years, now becomes a little bigger and stronger, too. 

I have to confess that the first thing I thought of when I saw the make-up of this district was The Woodlands-Kingwood series in baseball.  This revamped district should be a lot of fun for observers, if not for the teams involved.

The other ‘losers’ in the realignment would have to be Memorial and Strake Jesuit.  Memorial, like Kingwood and Atascocita, find themselves in a school district (Spring Branch ISD) where the other high schools are seeing enrollment drop them to 4A levels (Stratford was already there at the last realjgnment but successfully petitioned to stay in 5A) and find themselves now grafted in with the Katy ISD schools.

Strake Jesuit, the lone Houston-area private-school UIL stepchild, will move to that district with Memorial.  Strake is likely to spend its entire existence in the UIL shuffling from one district to another every other year–the proverbial 5A nomads. 

There was room for one more team in the seven-team Alief/Aldine district and Strake is geographically close to the Alief ISD schools, but they will return instead to compete against the same Katy schools that welcomed them into UIL play as district mates back in 2004.  That has to something akin to the welcome you could get in the 1980s at a Von Erich family Christmas gathering: reverse choke holds and body slams for everyone! (Don’t you just love obscure references that hint at the writer trying just a little too hard to be clever?)

We’ll offer some opinions on 4A winners and losers in the next post.