The Mississippi Association of Independent Schools (MAIS) is entering into a new classification cycle through the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 school years.

In the past, when the association would go through one of these changes, the announcement of the new classes would be done with press releases and some publicity, usually during football season in October or November.

Back in October of 2024, there was an initial vote on a new plan that was radically different from anything the MAIS has ever done.

The MAIS Activities Commission approved the plan with a second vote by a 17-1 count on Nov. 6.

The process of publicizing the changes was likely slowed when MAIS Executive Director Shane Blanton stepped down after over a decade of leading the association in late November.

Blanton was replaced by Pillow Academy principal Barrett Donahoe.

When the details leaked about a set of sweeping changes that would completely shake up the way championships have been awarded in the past, some MAIS schools started hearing pushback from supporters.

Talks about tweaking the plan were discussed formally. A January meeting of the MAIS Activities Commission included a note the MAIS Office would study the issue of the proposed playoff structure as members had “expressed a concern that there were too many championships being given.”

 Ultimately, the associate stuck with what it voted for back in November. A Jackson area sports reporter posted about it in late April and that generated discourse and discussion about how many championships will be awarded via social media.

Much of the comments by MAIS fans went along the lines of, “I don’t like it, but I haven’t seen a better option.”

The new classification system is a big departure from what’s been done in the past and I’ll do my best to explain it here and focus on how it’ll affect our local MAIS school, Brookhaven Academy.

 

Cougars are joining MAIS District 3-4A along with Parklane and others

In previous cycles, the MAIS would take the six largest schools in its ranks and create the 6A Class from those schools.

Presbyterian Christian School, located in Hattiesburg, was the only member of 6A that was not in the Jackson Metro area.

With a stated intent of wanting to cut down on travel, and a hope of playing for more championships in the future, Presbyterian announced last year that the school would be joining the Mississippi High School Activities Association (MHSAA) going forward.

Ironically, PCS ended its time in the MAIS by winning the 6A baseball championship last month.

PCS is far from the first school to leave one association for another in this state, but their departure precluded a shift in how the largest class of MAIS athletics would be sorted.

Beginning next year, the biggest 20 schools in the association will be sorted into the 4A classification. There will no longer be a 5A or 6A class in the league.

The new 4A is built around former 6A schools Jackson Prep, Jackson Academy, Madison-Ridgeland Academy, Hartfield Academy, and Madison-St. Joe.

Keeping Prep, JA, MRA, and Hartfield happy is an important part of MAIS decision making when it comes to athletics, as we’ll discuss later.

Some of those flagship schools have also flirted in the past with the idea of making a move to the MHSAA, with a couple of them even kicking the tires of that possibility around the same time PCS was talking through its move.

The easiest way to visualize the new 4A ranks is to say that JA, Prep, MRA, and Hartfield each got their own district that is also made up of four other smaller schools.

JA got paired with the northernmost schools in 4A, Bayou Academy (Cleveland), Pillow Academy (Greenwood), and Magnolia Heights School (Senatobia). As a consolation for all that travel, they also have Madison-St. Joe locally in District 1-4A.

Prep gets a district that goes down the west side of the state into Louisiana. Joining Prep in District 4-4A are Copiah Academy (Gallman), Cathedral School (Natchez), Silliman Institute (Clinton, La.) and Oak Forest Academy (Amite City, La.).

Hartfield Academy, which sits on the eastern side of the Jackson Metro area, will have schools from that direction in District 2-4A with them. Joining Hartfield will be Starkville Academy, Heritage Academy (Columbus), Lamar School (Meridian), and East Rankin Academy (Pelahatchie).

Brookhaven Academy will play in District 3-4A along with MRA, Park Place Christian Academy (Pearl), Simpson Academy (Mendenhall), and Parklane Academy (McComb).

 

State championship structure also reset with new reclassification plan

The next thing to study is the new championship structure and the easiest way to do that is to focus on football first.

In the new MAIS 4A of 20 schools, 16 teams will make the playoffs. The seeding will be done using a power point system, something the MAIS has been employing for a number of years.

The top four teams in the final power point ranking will play in a two-week playoff for the MAIS 4A Division I Championship.

The next six teams in the rankings will play a three-week playoff for the MAIS 4A Division II Championship.

The lowest-ranked six teams in that top 16 will also play a three-week playoff schedule that will end with one of them being crowned the MAIS 4A Division III Champion.

To summarize, 20 teams in the class, all except four make the postseason, and three state champions are crowned out of that group.

Basketball will follow a similar pattern in that there will be three state champions in 4A hoops. It’ll be the same for baseball, softball and soccer too.

The new 3A classification has 16 schools in it.

I won’t list them all here, but Adams County Christian School (ACCS), Bowling Green School, and Columbia Academy are some of the programs that are currently playing in the same class as BA that are dropping down.

The 3A class will hand out two state championships in football. The highest four seeds in the power points will play for the MAIS 3A Division I State Championship. The next eight highest seeds will use a three-week playoff to crown the MAIS 3A Division II State Champion.

So, if you are keeping track at home, that’s a total of 36 schools in the top two classes, with a combined five state champions for football coming out of that group.

The formula is similar in 2A, which will also have 16 schools and two state titles for football with all but four of the programs making the postseason.

Centreville Academy in southwest Mississippi and Discovery Christian School in Florence are the only two 2A schools located south of Canton, which is filled with schools in the Mississippi Delta and the surrounding areas.

For 2A basketball, there are more schools that will play hoops in that class after being 1A in football because they play the 8-Man variation of the game.

Examples of that would be Hillcrest Christian in south Jackson and Prentiss Christian just down Highway 84. Other 2A basketball schools like Laurel Christian and Lamar Christian (Purvis) do not field football teams.

Like it or not, the 8-Man game of football is more popular than ever within the MAIS ranks.

Between 2A-4A, there are a combined 52 traditional, 11-Man football playing schools in the MAIS.

The new 1A for football, which is subdivided between Division I and Division II, is made up of 32 schools that play 8-Man football.

There will be only two state championships out of those 32 8-Man football teams.

In comparison, there will be a combined seven state championships out of the 52 11-Man football programs in the MAIS.

 

Let’s take it back to 1996 for a minute

Adam Northam and the guys on “The Corner Blitz” radio show asked me to come on and talk about the changes last year when they were being proposed.

Adam is not originally from Mississippi and had lots of questions about how things had been done in the past and wondering what the future would look like.

When looking into the past of the association, a good place to study is 1996, a time when I was in high school at Brookhaven Academy and had a head full of hair.

That was the first season for what was then called the MPSA to create a new classification known as AAAA. The classification was created by taking the 12 largest schools in the association at that time.

The south division was made up of Jackson Prep, Jackson Academy, MRA, Parklane Academy, Adams County Christian School, and Hillcrest Christian.

The north division was made up of Starkville Academy, Heritage Academy, Pillow Academy, Washington Academy, Lee Academy, and Southern Baptist Educational Center in Southaven.

In the last 30 years, some of those schools, especially those located in the Mississippi Delta like Lee (Clarksdale) and Washington (Greenville) have experienced declining enrollment. None greater than Hillcrest Christian, which was once a basketball and baseball powerhouse in south Jackson that competed with MRA, JA, and Prep.

SBEC left the association to play in a Tennessee league many years ago too.

How does all that affect Brookhaven Academy, which had its largest number of students in school history last year?

Couple the growth at BA with population shifts in the state and you have the Cougars among the top 20 schools in the association, which might seem odd, because it is small when compared with the big dogs in the league like MRA and Prep.

Growing up going to MPSA/MAIS schools, you would always visit places that were so small they made BA feel huge. Many of those schools are gone now, like Pine Hills Academy or Union Academy, but the MAIS as a whole continues to add new schools every year.

However, most of those new members aren’t going to have the enrollment to field an 11-Man football team. They’ll either play the 8-Man variation or solely focus on other sports, such as basketball.

If you didn’t know, the MAIS is made up of schools from Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

In Louisiana, all the public and the vast majority of private schools play together under the umbrella of the LHSAA. The breakup of the MAIS equivalent in Louisiana (LISA) in 1992 ended up increasing the membership of the Mississippi based association with schools that did not wish to join the LHSAA.

Over the years, some of those schools, such as Central Private located near Baton Rouge, have left the MAIS to join the LHSAA.

Like the MAIS is doing now, the LHSAA decided in 2013 to start handing out more championships in order to make more people happy. At first, the league had allowed smaller private schools to “play up” in order to negate any advantages they held by recruiting.

Eventually though, the larger public programs in the state got tired of losing to football powerhouses like John Curtis and Calvary Baptist in the postseason.

The move was made to force those schools into playing only programs who had the same enrollment numbers. That led to John Curtis dropping down multiple classes and winning state championships by laughable margins in football.

The public schools in the state banded together and voted to make the private schools in the LHSAA, which is a much more complicated mix than Mississippi due to open enrollment parishes and charter schools, play for their own separate state championships.

It’s been messy, but the LHSAA has kept everyone mostly happy by giving out more state championships than ever.

One can imagine that’s the hope that the MAIS has for this new plan.

There is no doubt who’ll be among the top title contenders when the 4A Division I championship game rolls around later this year for football.

Prep is a combined 46-1 all-time against the teams it will play in district.

Parklane was the best team in the 5A ranks last season and MRA beat them 42-20 to open the year.

Jackson Academy has lagged behind the other big schools in football of late, yet they still beat their future district foes Bayou, Pillow, and Madison-St. Joe by a combined 105-7 score last year.

Hartfield, the two-time defending 6A state champs, beat their future district opponents Heritage (49-7) and Starkville (58-7) soundly last season.

 

There is no perfect plan, and time will decide if this one works

Personally, I would not want to be the one responsible for figuring out a solution to the problems that the MAIS is tackling.

The MAIS has already been making football schedules for the entire association. The reason being if they did not tell schools they must play Prep and Hartfield, then no one would sign up to play them or JA and MRA.

Most of the criticism I have seen and heard with the plan is the belief that three state titles in 4A seem excessive and waters down the honor.

Keeping the larger schools in the association happy isn’t an easy balancing act when compared with the wants of the rest of the league.

The football, basketball, and baseball programs of those Jackson Metro powers have shown that they can compete even with the largest, strongest members of the MHSAA on the courts and on the fields.

What the MAIS doesn’t want to happen is a repeat of what’s gone on over the years in Alabama.

The Alabama equivalent of the MAIS is called the AISA. The AISA is a shell of what it once was, as it continues to lose member schools to the AHSAA. After recently losing some of its bigger schools to the AHSAA, the AISA now has 30ish schools still fielding a mixture of 8-Man and 11-Man football teams.

 In Alabama, the many private schools that play in the AHSAA have an enrollment multiplier that puts them up in a higher class. There is also a competitive balance clause that any private schools that dominate a sport in the AHSAA eventually have to bump up a class.

An example of that would be Bayside Academy in Daphne, a school that has a small enrollment but plays in the AHSAA 7A ranks after winning 21-straight volleyball championships.

Hartfield Academy has already left the MAIS once for the MHSAA. It’s a much bigger, much different school now and the MAIS knows that if it were to lose Hartfield, Prep, MRA and JA, it might find itself on similar footing as the AISA.

In two years, we’ll get to see if any of this plan will need to head back to the drawing board and I’ll hold my final judgment until we see how it plays out between then and now.

Brookhaven Academy is scheduled to have home football games this season against Silliman Institute, St. Joseph-Madison, Central Hinds Academy, ACCS, and Simpson Academy. The Cougars will be on the road at Clinton Christian, Bowling Green School, Parklane, Centreville Academy, and MRA.

Brookhaven is 2-0 all-time against MRA, beating the Patriots 28-15 when they last met — in 1979.

Cliff Furr writes about sports for The Daily Leader.