A vote on whether to expand Maine’s primary sports regions from two to four and reorganize those regions’ member schools has been put off at least until mid-April.

“We took a straw poll to gauge support for it,” said Scarborough High School principal Andrew Dolloff. “To be honest, if we had to vote today whether to accept the proposal or not, it would have been voted down … probably unanimously.”

A proposal by the Maine Principals’ Association classification committee would have changed the current Eastern and Western Maine regional system into one featuring Northeast, Southeast, Northwest and Southwest regions.

The proposal resulted from the committee’s attempts to find ways to cut down on travel expenses incurred as teams compete in the state’s new open-tournament postseason format in most sports. It is also an attempt to try and even out the numbers of teams in each region as there are currently many more in the south, which has experienced a tremendous population growth the last several years.

“The straw vote indicated to the committee they were on the right track, but we wanted to see them go further with the fact-finding and give the sports-specific committees a chance to further evaluate all the nuances of the proposal,” said MPA executive director Richard Tyler. “Basically, we said ‘Go back and show us what the finished product will look like.”

Approximately 100 member schools were represented at Thursday’s MPA fall conference in Portland. The proposal was discussed at an interscholastic division business meeting.

“We found there were a lot of questions being asked that we had no answers for,” Dolloff said. “And since we’ve only been through one season with the open-tournament season, they were directed to come back with more information.”

Since basketball is the most profitable sport for high schools in Maine and it’s the only one in which every school in the state participates, members of the eight-member committee and school representatives decided it would be best to see how things go in the upcoming winter season before anything is decided.

“We kind of use basketball as a measuring stick for everything else,” said Dolloff.

So the next potentially serious action to be taken on the proposal could come at the MPA’s spring meeting in Rockport next April.

Member schools did vote on one thing. They voted to accept the classification committees proposal for new enrollment cutoffs for Classes A, B, C, and D.