WIAA: 2024-25 High School Sports Season begins Wednesday as Football teams hit the Fields

8/20/2024

The 2024-25 Washington State High School Football season begins on Wednesday, August 21 when teams can 1st begin official team practices. The first 3 days of practice are without pads and contact drills can begin on day 4. Teams are allowed up to 5 days of 2-day practices. Players must have 12 practices to be eligible to play in the 1st game. Teams can choose to host or play in a jamboree with other schools after 8 practices but are limited to know more than 40 plays for each player.

This is the 1st year of the new classification cycle and there has been many changes in leagues and league formats. Several schools have either moved up or down in classification, some leagues have combined some larger with divisions and other have lost a team or two. If you would like to take a look at where your school fits after all the shifting around click on this link and it will take you to a listing of all the Districts, click on that district and all the leagues and classifications for that district pop up. https://www.wiaa.com/districts/

Of course each team has set their goals to win the State Championship as the ultimate goal. This will be the 2nd year of playing the state Championship games at Husky Stadium. The final 12 teams will play 3 Championships on Friday, December 6 and the other 3 on Saturday, December 7.

This year the WIAA has also decided to go to a round of 32 in place of the District crossover games that had been traditional in week #10. The new format only impacts 4A, 2A and 1A. 3A has already been doing this for the past several years due to how large the 3A classification is with more than 70 schools. By rule the WIAA must provide 20 teams tournaments for any classification with 70+ schools and they went to the round of 32 to make it easy to get to a round of 16. Football, unlike many other sports is not one where you can simply add an additional play-off game on a Monday or Tuesday to determine the final 16.

The round of 32 matches up 1 vs 32, 2 vs 31 and so on and the teams are seeded by a seeding committee from the each classification. After the week 10 round and tournaments are reduced to 16 teams the WIAA then has their seeding committees seed the teams into the final 16 bracket.

This format will not impact the 2B or 1B classifications as both remain with 12 team tournaments, not a 16 team format. Those 2 classifications will remain as they have been.

For a quick re-cap of the State Champions from each classification last year we have all 6 Championship game results, links to the full bracket and links to the Championship video on the NFHS Network. (The NFHS Network is a subscription platform and you will need to purchase a subsrition to view the games if you don’t already have one.) And links to our coverage of each State Championship game from last December with stories, highlights, videos and interviews.

Let’s get set for REAL Football as the State High School Football season begins Wednesday!

4A
State Championship Game
Lake Stevens 31, Graham-Kapowsin 6
Link to State Bracket
Link to Championship Game Video on NFHS Network
Link to ESN Championship coverage