WHEELING – The WVSSAC state volleyball tournament and state football playoff are both in the middle of legal injunctions and litigations that are, as far as some coaches of local Ohio Valley teams can see, unprecedented.

“My wife and I are head coach and assistant coach at Tyler Consolidated, and we are almost 20-season volleyball officials with the SSAC and we have never seen anything like this and I can’t imagine seeing anything like this again,” Chris Bachman, head coach of Tyler Consolidated’s volleyball team, which finds itself in the midst of injunctions and the subsequent postponement of the Class-A state volleyball tournament, said.

“This is the first of its kind in my 32 years of coaching, I don’t remember anything like this,” Wheeling Park head coach Chris Daugherty, who’s Patriots are one of many teams affected by an injunction concerning the WVSSAC’s football playoff rating system, one that has shaken up the playoff seedings across classes and put the start date of the postseason into question, said. “Very different, and I think it’s still changing and moving as we speak.”

The West Virginia high school football playoffs are set to begin this Friday, but that is under scrutiny given what has transpired since an injunction was filed this past Friday by the Wood County Board of Education against the SSAC and their football playoff rating formula.

On Saturday, the injunction was upheld, and the football playoff ratings formula was changed that afternoon, resulting in a new playoff bracket for qualifying teams in all four classes.

In comparing the old and new brackets, four teams- Hampshire, Westside, Point Pleasant and Tolsia- went from qualifying for the playoffs to being excluded, while Capital, St. Albans, Lincoln and St. Marys were added in their place.

Several playoff squads’ rankings within the 16-team fields were also shuffled. Wheeling Park moved from the third seed in Class AAAA to the fifth seed.

As the playoff bracket currently stands, they would host Spring Mills, a team that had an 8-1 record before having to forfeit four of their games after-the-fact because of the participation of an ineligible player.

Legal action from one or more of the teams affected is a strong possibility. Daugherty said he’d received word that there had been an injunction filed by Point Pleasant asking for a delay in the playoffs, and a play-in game.

“I think there will be more injunctions, which will I think then push things to the supreme court,” Daugherty said. “I’ll be shocked if we play this Friday. I think we’ll have a week off and the supreme court will have to make the decision on what we should do. Probably 95% of the time they side with the original plan of the SSAC. So I could see this changing, possibly, if it gets pushed to the state supreme court.”

With litigation looming, there is uncertainty surrounding the future of this year’s playoff.

“It’s definitely bad for high school athletics,” Daugherty said. “This is the time of the year where things ought to be clear-cut, over, a new season starting with the playoffs and a lot of excitement for the teams in the state. Instead we have a lot of confusion, anger, and some teams that are upset that they were in and now they’re out. It isn’t good for high school athletics.”

For Tyler, the Knights have been on a rollercoaster that began on October 30 when, in the middle of postseason play, they received word that their volleyball and cheer teams had moved from Class-AA to Class-A.

“In double-A, we beat Wheeling Central in three straight sets,” Bachman said. “Two days later we were on our way to play Oak Glen in the sectional championship and we were told that we were no longer double-A and we would be moved to single-A.”

Then, in their new Class-A setting, Tyler defeated St. Marys in a game on Saturday, Nov. 2 to determine who would play Trinity in the regional championship. Trinity, though, filed an injunction in Monongalia County asking to play St. Marys instead of Tyler in the regional championship, which was granted.

St. Marys defeated Trinity in their game on Nov. 5. The WVSSAC seemed to reach a solution thereafter, where Tyler and St. Marys would play once more in a play-in game on the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 12.

“As of this past Friday, we were handed our state volleyball tournament package from the SSAC office,” Bachman said. “We were handed that and we were ranked as an eighth seed and St. Marys was ranked as a ninth seed. We were to do a play-in game to get into the state tournament. That match was supposed to happen [Tuesday] morning at approximately 10 o’clock. The winner of that match would have gone on and immediately played East Hardy, the number one seed.”

“At some point over the weekend, apparently one or multiple injunctions were filed and the SSAC put a halt to the single-A state tournament until all injunctions or litigations pending were stopped or figured out.”

It is unclear what the litigations are contesting.

Bachman said that he believes there is to be a court hearing in Romney, West Virginia on Tuesday at 8 a.m. in what is a developing situation.

“Hopefully we’ll know something more tomorrow,” he said.

Over this past summer, five West Virginia high school sports- including volleyball and football- were re-classified into a four-class system by the WVSSAC. In the following months, a group of 11 schools were moved out of the newly-made Class-AAAA into Class-AAA only for the upcoming season, and then another group of 11 just days later. Many schools objected to the competitive balance formula used to classify schools. As the postseason has unfolded, those concerns are rearing their head again just as they did before the season.

Despite the circumstances, the student-athletes at the heart of these decisions are remaining focused and upbeat.

“We talked to our team today,” Daugherty said. “We have a good bunch of kids and a gritty bunch. For a lot of reasons they fought through adversity this year and came out on top. I told them this is just one more hurdle. We’re going to keep our focus on the target, which is Spring Mills. Until someone calls and changes the target, we’re going to stay with Spring Mills and get ready for them this Friday.”

“We’re really proud of these girls because it has not been easy facing community comments, Facebook stuff- social media has not been our friend,” Sherry Bachman said. “Our focus has always been to keep these girls positive- ‘let’s stay on-target, our target is to get to Charleston and play volleyball.’ These girls have done everything we’ve asked them to do, they’re very focused and they’re ready to play whenever this gets figured out. They’re great kids, they really are.”