With the 2026 South Dakota High School baseball season well underway, there’s been some minor tweaks made to the Class B format and postseason play this year.

For the past half decade, Class B baseball followed a system with four regions with roughly 8-10 teams per region.

But the continued growth in popularity of high school baseball has prompted the South Dakota High School Baseball Association to make a change.

“We used to have a district/region format probably five or six years ago,” said SDHSBA Executive Director Dane Yde. “As we’ve grown and added more teams, we’ve been talking about going back to this for probably the last two years.”

With the new system, the four regions were each broken into two districts, with the four regions being renamed to North (Region 1), Metro (Region 2), South (Region 3), and West (Region 4).

Each district consists of 5-6 teams that are close in proximity to each other, with the top-4 seeded teams in each district (Based on the South Dakota High School Activities Association power point system) qualifying for the 8-team super regional.

But arguably the biggest change to the new format is how teams qualify for postseason play.

The old rules required each team to play everyone in their given region once to qualify for the postseason. Starting in 2026, the SDHSBA has transitioned from that requirement to simply playing 12 games against Class B opponents.

“Now with the district format, you’re required to schedule everybody in your district twice,” Yde added. “However, if a game gets rained out you don’t necessarily have to make it up now. What you do have to do is play at least 12 games against Class B teams. So not only can you still play everyone in your region if you want to, you can also play teams that may not be in your region but are close by in another region.”

The change was made by a culmination of factors, including travel and inconsistent spring weather in South Dakota.

“The biggest reason was because we had sort of maxed out our number of teams in Class B, going back to a district format allows teams to play more games closer to home and relieve some of the stress of travel,” Yde said. “That sort of filters down to point No. 2 which was, our springs are unpredictable and when we do have more adverse weather, being able to make up games within your district and closer geography is a lot easier than when you’ve got regions that can be really spread out.”

Yde added how the change adds scheduling flexibility to many teams that were in very scattered regions such as Region 1 (North) and 4 (West). But it also allows teams the opportunity to travel to play new competition.

Teams such as Canton, Dell Rapids, and Sioux Falls Christian have all made trips to the Black Hills this season to take on multiple West River opponents.

“The playoff format hasn’t changed, what did change was how we schedule within each region and part of that was breaking it down into districts,” Yde said. “But ultimately what you should’ve seen was teams playing games outside of their natural regions.

“Before they wouldn’t have maybe had that freedom and flexibility to do so, now they do if they want to.”

The SDHSBA has also added an extension to when teams can continue adding games to their schedule. Last season, teams were allowed to play extra games after the March 31 deadline, but wouldn’t count to their final seed points.

“Now if two teams want to add a game after the March 31 deadline, you now have until April 30 to add a game,” Yde said. “There’s a process in place for it, both teams have to send the request to the league administrator to verify the addition of the game. So there’s another hook for teams to get extra games in if they want to when we have really nice springs as well.”

But postseason play still remains the same format. The top-4 teams in each district will qualify for their corresponding super regional, where the eight teams will get ordered based on seed points, with the top-2 teams serving as the host sites.

“The only thing we did was divide each region into two districts and the only other component was now four teams from each district are going to qualify, rather than the top 8 teams in the region,” Yde said. “So it’s possible that one district may have five of the best eight teams, but this way each district is going to get equal representation in the postseason.”

But Yde says when it comes down to it, “flexibility was the biggest component.”

“I think this has felt like a really big change to some people, but to me it was a minor tweak to what we were already doing,” Yde said. “Everything about how we take teams and put them into regionals and qualify for state, that didn’t really change. The only thing that changed was how we schedule and get teams qualified.”

The Class B super regionals start May 17-20, with the final eight teams qualifying for the state tournament May 25-26 in Brookings.