(July 21, 2025) -- The first indication that something special was happening at Ward Melville in the 2024-25 school year came when what has become "the usual" happened one late-November day.

   It took fifth-year varsity goalkeeper Kate Ronzoni stopping an Arlington penalty kick in the final two minutes in Cortland, but the Patriots captured the NYSPHSAA Class AAA championship with a 1-0 victory.

   The title was the third in a row for Ward Melville, and the outcome extended the squad's remarkable unbeaten streak to 63 games (56 of them victories), a Long Island record, in that span.

   Four other Patriots fall squads registered success that translated into points in the New York State Sportswriters Association's All-Sport Championship, and then the school's second cheerleading title of the year in the winter wrapped up the overall Kerr Cup crown.

   The competition is named in honor of Neil Kerr, the former Syracuse Post-Standard sportswriter who was the driving force behind the NYSSWA for more than half a century.

   It is Ward Melville's first Kerr Cup crown and comes on the heels of a fifth-place showing in 2024.

   Ward Melville finished with 64 points to hold off Pittsford Mendon (59.83), Garden City (53), Cold Spring Harbor (50.5) and Maine-Endwell (49) in the NYSSWA's annual competition for New York State Public High School Athletic Association schools. Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake, Scarsdale, North Rockland, Penfield, and two-time defending champion Fairport rounded out the top 10.

   Thirty of the champions' points came from the Gameday and Competitive Cheerleading squads coached by Georgia Curtis.

   Ward Melville competes in Class AAA. The overall champions in the other classifications:

    •Class AA: Pittsford Mendon
    •Class A: Maine-Endwell
    •Class B: Cold Spring Harbor
    •Class C: Tuckahoe
    •Class D: Panama

The jury is still out on six classes

    The COVID pandemic created a disruption in the Kerr Cup. When we got back on track by compiling results for the 2023-24 school year, Fairport scored an unprecedented 31-point victory in the overall scoring.

    It was our first year of compiling results since the NYSPHSAA allowed many sports to expanded to six classes, and it raised the possibility that large schools from sections with few schools in Class AAA might be benefiting from easier paths into state tournament quarterfinals, where teams begin accumulating Kerr Cup points.

    Given this year's results, particularly with Ward Melville emerging from a crowded Class AAA field in Section 11, maybe Fairport was just that darn good last year.

    We'll continue to monitor the potential issue going forward, but there is no need for now to start exploring potential changes to scoring.

A quirky situation in Class D

    Before this year, our tabulations began with a simple rule: Schools were placed in their Kerr Cup classes based on where their BEDS numbers would have placed them in boys basketball.

    We never differentiated between boys and girls basketball because there didn't seem to be a need. But in looking at the cutoffs from this year ahead of compiling our data (which

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consisted of 921 data points), the disparity in the smallest classes was too great to ignore:

BOYS	CLASS	GIRLS
1084-up	AAA	1090-up
661-1083	AA	666-1089
376-660	A	378-665
217-375	B	229-377
120-216	C	126-228
119-under	D	125-under

    Given that, we decided to continue using the boys cutoffs for calculating overall scores but abiding by the girls basketball numbers for the girls scoring.

    This resulted in a quirk in the Class D girls: Five of the top six schools (there was a three-way tie for fourth place) had BEDS numbers that fell in that gap between the high end of the boys range for the smallest class and the low end of the girls range.

    In the previous scoring method, those schools would have been assigned to Class C in the Kerr Cup.

    The real oddity, however, began when we started looking at the combined boys and girls scoring in Class D. With its wide variety of sports and formats that crown anywhere between one and six state championship teams because of rules governing the minimum number of participating schools, the NYSPHSAA uses 19 different sets of classification cutoffs.

    Still, with so many sports having six classes, it's always been a given that every Class D school making our top five would score at least 15 points -- the reward for championships unless there is a combined-team situation.

    But that didn't happen this time. A crazy number of schools playing Class C basketball won Class D state championships in other sports -- including Hamilton in both softball and boys soccer -- because of those 19 different sets of cutoffs, and we ended up with just Panama and Saratoga Catholic earning 15 or more points.

    We're not inclined at the moment to go back to just using one set of classification cutoffs as this may have just been an anomaly; in theory, this could have happened in any previous year.

    Still, we'll continue to monitor the situation.