When the Western Reserve Conference and the Pioneer Conference began discussions to form a mega-conference in 2005, the landscape of Northeast Ohio high school athletics seemed to be in for yet another change.
High school conference shifting has become a near constant during the last decade. This year, the pace has slowed, but there was one switch affecting a Record Publishing Co. school. (Gnadenhutten Indian Valley joins Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy in the Principal's Athletic Conference this school year.)
Reasons for the switches run the gamut from school size to competitiveness issues -- but switches happen so often that keeping track of who's where can make a fan's head spin.
The negotiations between the WRC and Pioneer were designed to combat the things the schools' athletic directors believe caused schools to switch conferences.
The result of those negotiations was the formation of the Northeast Ohio Conference.
The 18-team, three-division mega-conference is impressive based on size alone. However, the conference's idea that divisions would not be set in stone, but each sport would be assigned a division based on relative competitiveness was a major shift.
While the idea looks good on paper, the NOC's division structure has schools scrambling all over the map.
For instance, on any given fall week, Stow-Munroe Falls could see its football team travel to Mayfield, its girls tennis team go to North Royalton, its boys soccer team head to Medina and its volleyball team head to Elyria.
Holy burning hydrocarbons, Batman!
When the conference was forming, I asked some athletic directors whether all that travel would be a concern. Most responded travel would be a issue, but not one that would be a deal-breaker for them joining the league.
Of course, they said that back when $4-a-gallon gasoline was a crazy notion, not a reality.
You don't need a degree in economics to know NOC members are going experience some serious pump pain once the buses start rolling later this month.
As for the competitiveness issue, how successful the league was at leveling the playing field depends much on who you talk to.
On the one hand, year one of the NOC allowed some programs to win titles for the first time in recent memory. For example, Nordonia scoring league titles in boys basketball and girls tennis would have been inconceivable in the WRC.
Likewise, many teams who didn't win titles were still competitive against their division opponents.
However, while some teams saw their chances for success improve, others came into some very tough situations.
For example, Stow-Munroe Falls boys soccer coach Kyle Kosmala said at season's outset that the Valley Division was the toughest six-team division in Ohio.
Chances are that if a team plays in the Valley Division in any sport, there's at least one state power to deal with in the division.
The slotting system also creates another issue: maintaining local rivalries can be tough when a school plays a different set of teams in every sports.
Twinsburg baseball coach Don Jones lamented this fact to me last spring. Although the Tigers won the Lake Division in baseball, Jones said he preferred to play the WRC-type schedule because the teams played each other in all sports, thus breeding familiarity.
I have to say I agree with Jones on this one. It makes too much sense for the NOC to settle on three six-team divisions and have those schools play each other in every sport.
If the NOC was looking for a blueprint to work off of, there's one within the state which has worked for decades.
The Ohio Capital Conference makes the NOC look small by comparison. The OCC is a 30-team, five-division league which stretches from Mount Vernon to Lancaster to Newark and includes just about every large school in suburban Columbus.
While the OCC does shift its divisions every few years, the schools in those divisions play each other in every sport.
Travel distances aside, the OCC has been around since 1966, so it must be doing something right.
As for the long-term viability of the NOC, opinions seem to vary.
While some officials I've spoken with say the league needs to be careful lest it cease to exist, there always seems to be a rumor that some of the larger schools outside the conference want to join.
This looks like one of those "wait-and-see" issues, although I think it's more likely for the conference to expand than implode in the coming years.
If, however, the NOC ends up not working, get ready for another round of "high school league carousel" -- and this time, half of Northeast Ohio may be involved.
E-mail: mleonard@recordpub.com
Phone: 330-686-3913