After patiently waiting since December, school districts learned their new districts when UIL announced district realignments Feb. 2 at 9 a.m.

Canyon High School was classified as a 4A school to begin the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school year early last December. Because Canyon High will be a large 4A school, football will be division one out of two divisions with Hereford, Dumas, Pampa and Canyon. In all other UIL activities of District 3-4A, Levelland, Lubbock Estacado, Lamesa, Hereford and Canyon will compete against each other.

“Realignment is always an exciting time especially when you get put in a district with new teams to play and new places to travel,” Principal Tim Gilliland said. “You get to know some different schools and how they do things.”

Head girls basketball coach Joe Lombard said Canyon High’s enrollment has spent a large amount of time on the boundary between classification realignment.

“We’ve been back and forth from 4A to 5A and 3A to 4A for the 33 years I’ve been here,” Lombard said. “We’ve had equal amount of time in those two qualifications.”

Gilliland said there is not a lot of change academically for the school except competing against smaller schools.

“We’ve been in this bigger district with Amarillo schools,” Gilliland said. “It’s going to be new, but there’s a lot of things to be worked out so we can make this work for the next two years.”

Lombard said moving south with our district will bring more travel to compete against new schools.

“It’s really exciting to play some different schools and develop new rivalries,” Lombard said. “It’s going to be competitive. We’re going to be playing schools we’ve never played before or we maybe haven’t played in many years.”