ALLENTOWN - It’s colder and leaves are starting to fall from their summer homes on the trees.

Each leaf is like another team that falls by the wayside as the postseason approaches on the fall sports schedule.

With that as the backdrop, officials from District 11 announced the plans for the postseason - not just for fall, but for winter and spring sports as well, during a press conference at Coca-Cola Park on Thursday.

The conference opened with Dr. John Hauth, the Senior Director for Sports Medicine Relationships from St. Luke’s University Health Network, who spoke of the expanding role that the network is playing in high school sports.

St. Luke’s recently opened an athletic training facility at Coca-Cola Park that is used not only by the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, but is also available to local high school teams and athletes. He also touted the soon-to-be opened 55,000-square-foot orthopedic hospital, which will be a part of the West End Medical Center Complex.

“We have worked hard with District 11 to raise the awareness about athletic injuries and safeguarding student athletes and educating parents, coaches, and athletes about injury prevention and doing everything we can through this partnership to keep our athletes safe,” said Hauth about the partnership between the hospital network and D-11 sports.

Updates were given on the postseason for golf, which has already begun, and for tennis playoffs, which begin next week.

Bob Hartman, Athletic Director at Whitehall High School and President of District 11, spoke about Officials Appreciation Week, which will be held throughout District 11 next week. High school sports across Pennsylvania are facing shortages of officials and Hartman urged schools, parents, players, and fans, to show appreciation to the officials in every sport. The program started in Pennsylvania, and has now been adopted by the National Federation of High School Sports and will be a national recognition to draw attention to the work of sports officials.

Tamaqua Area School District Superintendent Ray Kinder, chairman of the District 11 basketball committee, spoke about upcoming changes for the basketball season, including the elimination of the one-and-one foul shot rule, which was recently approved by the PIAA. Rather than having fouls lead to a one-and-one situation where a shooter is awarded a second shot if they make the first foul shot, basketball will now go directly to a two-shot situation with fouls being reset at the beginning of each quarter.

“This came from the NFHS. The rationale was improving the flow of the game and also reducing the injury risk,” said Kinder. “Rebounding is supposedly where most of the injuries occur and I can tell you that at the state level, I was the only one vehemently opposed to changing the rule. I feel the rebounding is a more controlled situation on one-on-one than on normal rebounding where every player on the floor is going for the ball.”

Kinder wondered out loud if the changes to the foul rule could be an opening to bringing in a shot clock for high school basketball. Hartman stressed that as a whole, District 11 also did not condone the changes to the one-and-one rule for basketball.

Northwestern athletic director Jason Zimmerman, who chairs the football committee, announced that 3A and 6A classifications will both have eight qualifiers, and the remaining classes will have the top four teams advancing to the district playoffs. There will also be subregionals with Districts 2 and 4, and the top eight teams will be determined at-large with no district guaranteed to have qualifiers.

Zimmerman announced that because of the availability of officials, it would be impossible to have all six qualifications playing on the same day because of the shortage of officials. As they did last season, if two teams from the same district advance to the semifinals, they would be paired together no matter what their seeding, in order to set up a de facto district championship. All finals will be played at neutral sites with any quarterfinal or semifinal games being played at the higher seed’s home field.

It was announced that neutral postseason sites will generally remain the same as they have been with district swimming taking place at Parkland, diving at Emmaus, baseball at DeSales University and softball at either Patriots Park in Allentown or at DeSales. Some other sites are still being determined in various sports.

Hartman also pointed out that girls’ wrestling postseason schedules and sites are being worked on, but there is one issue that has been a sticking point. When the PIAA sanctioned girls’ wrestling, they did not stipulate that boys’ and girls’ teams had to have separate coaches, which means it is conceivable that a school’s boys’ team could be wrestling in one location at the same time the girls’ team would be scheduled elsewhere.

There are about 112 schools with girls’ wrestling teams, and all will be in the same classification.