Coop sports…the start of high school free agency, or maybe a plug for school consolidation?

Cooping. It’s the new buzz word in Missouri high school athletics. Chances are you’ll be hearing that word a lot in the near future.

It’s no secret that many Missouri lawmakers are pushing hard for consolidating small school districts. Only time will tell if last week’s vote by Missouri school districts on a proposal from the Missouri State High School Activities Association hastens that day.

By a vote of 213 for and 200 against, an amendment to allow two high schools from Classes 1, 2 or 3 to sponsor one team in a specific sport and draw students from both schools, passed during annual balloting on changes to the Missouri State High School Activities Association constitution and bylaws.

Applications for cooperative sponsorships will be accepted by MSHSAA between July 1 and December 1 during the school year of each two-year cycle. Initial implementation of the amendment will be for district football assignments for the 2006-07 and 2007-08 two-year period. Sports coops can only be formed with schools whose boundaries touch.

So let the recruiting wars begin!

Well… hopefully it won’t come to that, but who knows what will happen when coaches and athletes start casting their eyes around the HDC and GRC, two conferences that will be greatly affected by the measure.

Make no mistake, some former HDC athletes would have made good football players, if they had had the opportunity and were inclined to take advantage of it. What school wouldn’t have wanted Michael Fischer (Winston) quarterbacking its football team? What coach wouldn’t have given Frank Wheeler (Jameson) or Matt Prescott (Tri-County) a chance to line up at wide receiver? Picture, if you would, Dean Swalley taking an option pitch and seeing nothing but an open field ahead of him and offensive tackle Graham Wiles.

Right now, coaches, athletic directors and administrators in the HDC and GRC seem to be lining up on both sides of the issue.

“For most small schools that field teams there could be greater room for loss than gains,” says Winston High School athletic director Eric Lewis, who was firmly against the measure. “The cooping issue will be lopsided one direction, small to large school programs,” he adds. “Programs that are already small in numbers could be lost to cooping (i.e. boys fastpitch softball).”

Lewis asks some good questions that must be addressed by individual school boards, “Which school’s policies pertaining to grades and discipline will be followed? The possibility of picking up a few athletic kids from the neighboring farm community for your program is attractive, but must be offset by increased costs in equipment, uniforming and transportation,” he adds.

Other HDC officials, like North Mercer superintendent Kelley Rogers, and Princeton football coach Chris Holt, have advocated coop sponsorships. Rogers, sat on the MSHSAA Board of Directors for eight years while superintendent at Macon High School. He was also a superintendent of schools in Iowa when sports cooping began there. Mercer kids would obviously be a perfect fit for Princeton’s football program.

“The whole concept of cooping has to be student related,” said Rogers. “It should not be a team, school or parent related agenda,” he added. “I think we need to provide the avenues for them to go out and compete.”

Rogers certainly isn’t wrong about providing opportunities for kids in the HDC to play basketball. Lack of numbers have crippled several basketball programs in the league in recent years. Ridgeway’s girls could not field a team last season. Neither could Cainsville’s boys. North Daviess did not have a boys basketball program in 2004-05, and only played four games in 03-04 before lack of numbers forced cancellation of the rest of the schedule.

“I think in our situation it (cooping) is a good thing, because right now we have four kids who don’t have the opportunity to play basketball,” said North Daviess superintendent and athletic director Todd Willhite. “I know in the past we have lost kids in our district just because of athletics, he added.”

Coach Holt of Princeton High School was quoted in Thursday’s News-Press. “For us, (it) gives us the chance to tap into another community. With our enrollment declining, it’s just one of those things where you don’t want your enrollment to drop to where it’s hard to field a team. We see it as an opportunity to increase our numbers, even if it’s just five or six kids.”

North Harrison High School principal Mark Fletcher also endorsed the proposal after seeing it work in Iowa. In the same News-Press story, he said that North Harrison has declined to field an 8-man football program because of lack of funds to do so. It would be cheaper for North Harrison kids to play 11-man football at South Harrison, rather than start a new program in Eagleville.

Other questions…Is it conceivable that North Daviess kids could wear uniforms of three or four different schools in the same school year? If Gilman kids coop football with South Harrison, do they get to raise a GRC champion football banner in their gym?

I assume that existing 8-man football schools, say in the Highway 275 Conference, can not, or would not, shut down their football programs in order to give their kids a chance to play 11-man football at Maryville, Rock Port or Tarkio. MSHSAA endorses the state 8-man football playoffs, and would not allow this to happen. In their coop applications to MSHSAA, schools must show a lack of numbers, lack of staff, lack of an existing program or lack of facilities in order to justify entering into a coop agreement with another school.

There’s one issue I haven’t heard addressed, but it surely will be. I offer this as purely hypothetical, and I’m not picking these three schools to use as an example for any particular reason.

Say, for instance, Gilman City has a strong group of sophomore athletes and the school enters into a coop football agreement with South Harrison for a two-year period in which the Bulldogs win back-to-back GRC titles. When those Gilman City kids are seniors, however, Gallatin is the overwhelming favorite to win a conference football crown. Do those Gilman City kids stay and build on what they’ve accomplished at Bethany, or do they head down the road to Gallatin? On the other hand, what if South Harrison sees a better group of football athletes at North Harrison and decides not to renew with Gilman City? Who wins and who loses?

Wouldn’t cooping in football put added pressure on a coach and school board to know what kids are out there in adjoining districts? A coach’s job is to coach, not coordinate recruiting efforts.

Gallatin head football coach Mark Cole, who believes the well-being of kids is being put second in the coop issue, had this to offer: “There’s a possibility that a kid could be in a program as early as seventh grade, play some varsity or junior varsity as a freshman, put in his time in the weight room and at camps…then if a school board decides to break that contract, he’s out in the cold. If I was a parent of that kid, I’d be awfully upset.”

If underclassmen have put in their time in another school’s football program, and that contract is broken following a two-year cycle, there is no guarantee those kids can find another school to coop with. What’s more, if schools decide to end their coop agreement after the first year of a two-year cycle, those kids being coopted must sit out a year until the next two-year cycle.

If GRC schools decide to coop kids from HDC schools for football, who makes the first move? Will ailing HDC basketball schools coop with fellow HDC schools, or will they opt to approach a larger GRC school. Only time will tell.

Coach Lewis asks that we consider another potential parent’s point of view. “How will it be received if a coop athlete is playing in front of local kids that have spent their whole lives practicing and playing for their school? It’s easy to say, ‘put the best kids out there,’ but wait til it’s your son sitting, so a ‘one-year ringer’ from 25 miles down the road can play.”

Sports cooping is not limited to football, and not exclusively a male sports issue. The proposal would work well for kids who wish to play golf or wrestle. Hamilton is one of the only small schools in the area that offers cross country. Emily Greenwood, a 2004 Penney High graduate, was a one-woman swim team for the Hornets during her senior year. Who knows, the coop measure might allow schools to create sports programs from scratch.

One final thought on how the coop issue would affect Gallatin. When Gallatin coops a school for football, it also takes on that school’s enrollment numbers for purposes of determining classification. Gallatin was just 49 students below the cutoff for Class 2 last season. By cooping kids from an adjoining HDC school for football, Gallatin would likely move up in class, just for the sake of a handful of new recruits. On the other hand, South Harrison has plenty of room before reaching Class 3 status.

The only thing I know for sure is that not only do I not have all the answers, I don’t even have all the questions.