When Gregg McBride made up his own classification

The Small School Top Tens of 1960-1966.

I am an unabashed contractionist. I believe Nebraska prep basketball needs fewer classifications. I would make two basketball classes disappear if handed the gavel or the magic wand or whatever. Poof. I think fewer state champions would make better state tournaments, more exciting district tournaments, and, maybe most important to me, less insane and jimmy-rigged postseason formats.

Where would the political will come from to contract classes? I have no idea. Seems almost impossible to think a majority of schools would vote themselves a longer path to the state tournament. But it has happened. Twice, the membership of the NSAA has voted for fewer classes. Of course, once required a World War! In 1943, after one year of four classes, the state reversed its system to the early-1930 model of two classes to save gas and tire tread for the war effort. The other instance, though, gives me hope.

In 1960, the NSAA schools put the kibosh on the six-class experiment of the late 1950s and returned to four classes by making both the largest and smallest divisions bigger. Class AA was eliminated, and Class A returned to 32 teams. On the other end, the 101 Class E teams were absorbed into Class D, making it 240 teams.

It was a reaction to the small-school changes that motivated legendary prep scribe Gregg McBride to create a small-school top-ten rating for the smallest of the schools in the new Class D. Every week during basketball season, he would rank the top ten teams in Class D and the top ten teams from a subset of Class D that included only schools with 25 boys or fewer.