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HShockeywatcher wrote: The number is used for the school's enrollment for classification in all boy's and girl's sports, not just hockey. It is not sport specific.
It would be interesting to come up with some stats over a couple years of involvement in sports and see how likely f/r students are to play sports and what sports are played.

When the MSHSL first put in the multiplier it was based on what they were seeing in participation rates, since then the multiplier hasn't changed but participation costs have gone up at most schools pretty significantly. I don't know if they still look at the overall rates or not.

Obviously there are variables in whether f/r students participate: some districts waive all or part of athletic fees for f/r students, what schools charge as a fee varies greatly..... I can give you a school where football is $400 and another where all sports and activities is a one time $15 fee, so for $15 you can play 3 sports be in the play and band...Sports that require an outside facility like hockey, golf, swimming, and gymnastics have significantly lower rates than track or wrestling because kids don't play them at the youth level due to cost and those are sports you can't just start up at in high school. Lastly location plays a pretty big part in f/r participation rates, Edina will have a lower rate than Minneapolis North as Edina has a low f/r to begin with and North needs those f/r kids at a fairly high rate to even field teams, also rural parts of the state and smaller districts generally have higher f/r rates but also higher participation rates than the Metro/Duluth/Rochester areas do.

Someone name me one team that is at class a because of this free reduced lunch thing.

There's a few, try the google, it's pretty easy to get actual enrollments from the Minnesota Department of Education and the MSHSL page gives adjusted enrollments.

Highland Park is one, Rochester Century would be another, Century opted up to AA, Winona a third.

Kennedy. Maybe Chaska that one is really close. There's more if you want to look into it.

If f/r were not counted for hockey classification as they are now 3/5, several more public schools would be moved down. That would have moved St. Thomas up into AA long ago. 1 for 1 reduction makes sense.