I’m on the school board in my hometown and normally when I show up for meetings, it’s just the board, the administration and our hometown reporter. So I was pretty surprised last Monday to walk in and see 15 or so folks assembled in the back of the room. They were there to debate our cooperative athletic agreement between our town (190 kids in grades 10-12) and a smaller town nearby (54 kids in grades 10-12) that we have for football, golf and track. Our other sports teams remain town specific, but together we become the Thunder.
3 members of the board had brought this up earlier as a partnership they’d like to dissolve. It’s been in existence now for 15 years and the Thunder name has not taken off as expected, the townspeople want to be known by the community name, our football team hasn’t been successful due to it playing against schools with higher singular enrollment and we might have the opportunity to have some of those kids open enroll in our school if they can’t play football otherwise. We didn’t have this item up for formal action this past week, so I just expected some more discussion. Apparently word got out about it and members of the school board and community from the smaller town came out to voice their opinions. They are in a tough spot because they have to agree to this partnership or they risk not being able to offer these programs. Without us, they would have no football opportunities for their kids.
We’ve decided to postpone the decision until January when we hear what the adjusted classification formula will determine if we might be a 1A school without the smaller town or remain a 2A school regardless. Right now, we’re so close to the cutoff level that with our continued growth we’re likely to remain a 2A school, so I don’t know if that argument really matters.
My opinion is that we keep the cooperative but rename the partnership to include the town’s names. I’d be open to changing the nickname and color to match that of our town as well. There appears to be no financial reason to end it, and that’s the biggest factor for me. It would be great to have more kids open enroll in our school, but I don’t want to be in the business of forcing another school not to have a program so that they would open enroll here. I think that would create a real bad taste in the mouth of the smaller community which would likely lead them to sending their kids the other direction to enroll in a much larger school.
In my mind, there are 3 things that make for a good high school athletic program (be it football, basketball or other sports), in order of importance. 1) Kids programs – opportunities for kids to learn the game, practice the fundamentals, and have a passion for the sport. 2) Coaching at the high school level. 3) Athlete cycles – by this I mean that at certain times schools have a great athletic family that provides outstanding players to the program – if multiple kids hit the team at the same time, you’re probably going to state, if only one is hitting at a time, you’ll be an average team. That’s more luck than something you can plan for. So if we want to get better at football, we should concentrate on the top two items.
It seems that we’re not addressing the root of the problem which is that our football team is no good. We can try to move down classifications, dissolve partnerships or get better pads, but none of that is going to change the fundamental reasons why our team can’t compete.
Eric's space 