The Louisiana High School Athletic Association will have two releases today that will affect many athletes in the Teche Area.

It won’t be some new regulation regarding grades or something else that deals with athletic participation, rather it will be an official power ranking and an unofficial power ranking.

The official ranking is the power ranking for prep volleyball teams in the state. These are the numbers that volleyball teams will be seeded by when the playoffs for Division I all the way down to Division V begin later this week.

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The unofficial rankings will be the week nine rankings for the prep football teams in the state as the regular season closes this week starting with Thursday’s games and ending with Saturday’s games.

Both sets of rankings are very important.

The volleyball rankings will show whether a team makes postseason play and who that team’s opponent will be and who they have to look forward to playing as the postseason winds down to the state tournament at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner starting Nov. 12.

But the unofficial football rankings are just as important, if not more important than, the volleyball rankings.

With one week left in the season, teams on the “bubble,” those ranked from 28 to 32, have but one game to get off the bubble and try to secure a safer rankings. In football, the only teams that are guaranteed a playoff spot are district champions and if a district champ is seeded below 32, then the 32nd team in the power rankings gets bumped down so the district champ gets in.

So if two champs are lower than 32, then 31 and 32 get bumped down �- and so on down the line.

What makes it particularly unnerving about volleyball is that the LHSAA has not released unofficial rankings since Oct. 12, so teams really don’t know where they stand as the regular season came to a close.

“No one knows where they are seeded right now,” said NISH volleyball coach Ron Hebert, whose team is safe enough to get a playoff bid but who also doesn’t know where his team will be seeded. “There are only 24 teams in each division that will make the playoffs. The first eight get first round byes and the other sixteen will play each other in the first round.”

So two months of playing volleyball comes down to whether a team is ranked in the top 24 in the state. And two months of football comes down to one game to see if a team will make the playoffs or get bumped.

Is it any wonder that coaches throughout the Teche Area are interested in today’s releases?

NEAL MCCLELLAND is assistant sports editor of The Daily Iberian.