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I don't know if anyone's from CA, but CA has had five classes (Division 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) for years.
The state of CA is broken into 9 sections: Los Angeles, San Diego, Southern, San Joaquin, Northern, North Coast, Central Coast, Oakland , and San Francisco sections.
In the majority of the sections, the individual schools vie to win their respective LEAGUE titles before moving on to the SECTION playoffs in their respective divisional placements.
Other teams (sometime .500 or sub .500 teams) can also petition and be selected for SECTION playoffs as well. The section champion and runner-ups get berths to the state playoffs.
The only exceptions are the Oakland and SF sections. The Oakland section consists of the 6 Oakland public school teams that make up the Oakland Athletic League. The SF Section consists of the 11 public schools that make up the SF Academic Atheletic Association. These teams play their league games, win the league championship and automatically get a berth to the State playoffs (since the league championship is also a section championship).
This has been a point of contention recently since the SF teams get a easy road to the state playoffs. SF teams have been competitive recently. Oakland teams usually are pretty good so not many people complain about this. Despite this, there was talk a few years ago to merge SF/Oak into the North Coast or Central Coast sections.
Both SF/Oak are in interesting situations as they both have surrounding schools that play in other sections. SF Catholic schools play in the West Catholic Athletic League that plays in the Central Coast Section. There are other smaller private schools in SF that play in the Bay Counties League that are part of the North Coast Section. Oakland has St. Joesph (Jason Kidd's alma mater) and Bishop O'Dowd (two Catholic powerhouses) that play in a different league.
So, CA doesn't exactly allow "everyone" to get to the state. But there is a rather big post season in place regardless.
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