Bye, bye Patriot District; Hello District 7! Although it may almost be summer and school is almost officially over, it is never too early to start looking ahead at what changes will come to AHS this fall. The Patriot District will be introducing new changes this fall; the changes include taking Robert E. Lee HS out of the Patriot District and completely redoing the structure of the districts. Taking out Lee will reduce the number of teams in the Patriot District to seven.

“I don’t like [the new change] because whenever we play Lee we know we’re going to beat them. So, that is reassurance so we know that we will have one win for the season,” sophomore Lee Hayes said.

Not only does the Patriot District lose Lee, but all districts in the state of Virginia are being completely rearranged. AHS will no longer be in the Patriot District; the new district is called District 7. But, the Patriot District isn’t the only district facing changes; every school in Virginia will now be labeled under a new system.

“From my understanding the new system will feature six divisions with each of these divided into eight conferences that have 2 sectionals; northern and southern,” senior Abner Casillas said.

That being said, the districts are being grouped together by the size of the school and not by region; hence the Northern District being eliminated. Along with that, previous state records set in all sports are now frozen in time and never to be broken. Due to the changes being made, the records become invalid; the records will remain on their boards,but are no longer changing. This means that the 1^st person to do an event in any sport will be the new record holder until it is broken by another school.

“The only reason I can think of [the changes being made] is to reduce costs and have schools be more competitive with other schools like themselves,” health teacher Gabriel Romano said.

The changes have come as a shock to many athletes and coaches who have no idea whether these changes will bring success to their school’s athletic teams or make the hope of being competitive and successful in their districts harder than it was before.

“It’s really confusing. No one knows what is going on. Maybe in three years they will figure it out,” senior Austin Chavez said.