Last August, we published the results of our level-based play survey, conducted in May 2025, and our analysis of the playoff results in all sports from 2021-25. You can find that article here.
We've continued that study, looking at playoff results from the most recent fall season in football, men's soccer, volleyball, and women's tennis. We analyzed every contest in which a charter school and a traditional, geographically based high school played against each other. We wanted to see if the move to eight classifications had an effect on the charter vs. traditional competition.
If charter schools, by virtue of being charter schools, have a significant athletic advantage, we should see charter schools winning these contests a majority of the time, by a statistically significant margin, and across all classifications.
Here are the results from the fall 2025 playoffs, in all four fall team sports, in class 1A through 4A, where all of the charter schools reside.
It's early yet ... only one season, after all. So many of the results are not yet statistically significant. Plus, these results are not "independent" ... the same team may be responsible for several wins in a given sport.
All that said, in tennis, the smaller traditional schools (1A and 2A) held their own, but traditional schools in 3A and 4A struggled against the larger charter schools, which are often based in large urban areas. This corresponds to the results of our 2021-25 study, which isolated the disparity in tennis to the 2A classification, and most of those schools now reside in 3A and 4A.
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