CHAPEL HILL — The NCHSAA has once again tinkered with its playoff format, voting into place a pair of adjustments at its board of directors meeting Wednesday in Chapel Hill.

The first change, approved unanimously, will affect teams that make the playoffs without automatic berths beginning in the 2018-19 school year.

Under the current rule, at large berths are seeded into brackets based upon conference finish, then by Adjusted MaxPreps Ranking. For example, all third-place finishers that didn’t earn automatic berths were evaluated against each other first, then all fourth place finishers and so on until the bracket was filled.

Under the new rule, teams will still be evaluated by tiers but with the next-highest finisher outside of a conference’s automatic berths pool being compared against all other conferences' next-highest finishers, regardless of the team’s conference finish.

In the new system, a third-place finisher out of a conference with two automatic berths and a fourth-place finisher out of a conference with three automatic berths would both be evaluated for a playoff spot in the same tier.

Also written into the new rule is that “under no circumstance may a team leap-frog a higher finishing team in its own conference.”

NCHSAA assistant commissioner James Alverson said the change reflected the spirit of the original playoff seeding system when the board voted it into place last spring.

In another change to its playoff system, effective for 2018-19, the board voted unanimously to expand the 1-A playoff field for basketball and volleyball from 48 to 64 teams, the same number of teams in the 2-A and 3-A playoffs fields.

“The number of schools participating in those sports approached the number of schools in 2-A and 3-A,” NCHSAA board president Joe Poletti said. “Thirty-six more teams make the playoffs next year, and it ends those first round byes.”

The playoff fields for 1-A football, baseball, softball and soccer remains at 48 teams, as do the 4-A playoff fields for those sports and volleyball and basketball.

The board also unanimously approved a rule that requires all regular-season soccer games to come to a win-loss conclusion, scrapping ties across the state.

Until now, each conference decided its own protocol on whether to allow ties or to force teams to play to penalty kicks to decide regular-season games.

“The coaches were about 50-50 on it,” Poletti said. “And the idea was to play the games like the playoffs would be and to make it uniform for whatever kind of rankings there would be.”

In other business, board members will appoint two subcommittees to work on separate issues over the summer. One will draft a proposal for guidelines on the athletic eligibility of homeschool students, some of which are already playing public school athletics if they take some classes through public schools.

In keeping with the NCHSAA’s commitment to expanding opportunities, the other sub-committee will draft inclusion policies with a focus on guidelines for the participation of transgender athletes.