Southwest Schools Begin League Shuffle
By
Wes Morgan
Special for MHSAA.com
December 6, 2016
Just when it seemed that the waters had calmed concerning conference realignment in Southwest Michigan, two area leagues are expected to lose a chunk of their respective memberships with the berth of a new alliance.
It was announced in June that Bronson would be leaving the Berrien-Cass-St. Joseph League at the end of the 2016-17 school year to join the Big 8 Conference. The BCS began in 2014.
Now, all three St. Joseph County schools — Centreville, Mendon and White Pigeon — along with Cass County seat Cassopolis, are expected to exit the BCS this year as well. Those schools are joining Southwestern Athletic Conference defectors Bangor, Bloomingdale, Eau Claire, Hartford, Decatur and Marcellus to form the Southwest 10 Conference.
Seven of the 10 school districts have already voted in favor of the new league, with the last three unnamed schools expected to vote the same way later this month.
Once again, football was a driving force, though several other factors sparked the initial discussions back in August. It was important for Centreville, Mendon and White Pigeon to stick together after a long run dating back to the St. Joseph Valley League.
Competitive fairness and logistics were two other key concerns.
“(The SAC schools) came into this meeting stating the No. 1 goal is to not have a mega conference,” Mendon co-athletic director Glen Samson said. “They tried to get us to strike while the iron is hot. At the same time they are discussing this with us, the superintendents of the SAC and the BCS wanted us to all get together and form an even larger league, like 35 schools.
“We’ve just not had a whole lot of luck with this large conglomerate. It’s not really a league. You can see people voting on party lines, so to speak.”
A big obstacle in the BCS was football scheduling. The BCS did not make it mandatory that teams play cross-divisional games, which left some schools in the lurch when it came to filling out a nine-game schedule.
For instance, Mendon had to drive to the Upper Peninsula in Week 9 to play Manistique after finding no takers from similar-sized schools and with no desire of its own to compete against the likes of Class B programs up to three times a year.
Current BCS schools like Berrien Springs, Buchanan, Comstock and Parchment — all with about 450 students or more — are twice the size of schools like Mendon (203) and Cassopolis (278).
“This idea came across our table, so we took a look at it,” Samson said. “The schools involved want to keep it to 10 teams. The more we got into it, the more it made sense.
“When Bronson left, it left us with four teams in our division in football. All that guaranteed Mendon, Centreville and Cass were three games. We’re sitting here with three games, and we have to find six and we have to now play two or three Class B schools to fill out a schedule in a league of 18 teams. This is not right.”
A 10-team league solves that issue and makes for easier organization of all other sports. More often than not, Samson and Cassopolis athletic director Matt Brawley agreed, coaches didn’t even know what division their school was in as the groupings changed by sport.
“Scheduling and getting the bylaws in order,” are at the top of the priority list for Brawley. “Right now, things seem to be running pretty smoothly. We have a great group of athletic directors and superintendents working diligently.”
If all goes according to plan, schedules will take care of themselves in the Southwest 10 since most schools offer the same sports. There are five schools that offer soccer with a sixth considering adding it for next season. A positive byproduct would be less travel time.
“For Cass, logistically, our furthest drive (would be) 37 miles,” Brawley said. “Marcellus and Decatur are our next-door neighbors. It doesn’t make much sense not to play them (as is the case now).
“I’m very excited,” Brawley said of a new league without divisions. “What I’m most excited about is being in a league where you’ve got to (likely) win nine games to win the conference championship or go 17-1 or 16-2 in basketball. It holds a lot more weight. The BCS is a great bunch of people, but this opportunity makes the most sense for us.”
Wes Morgan has reported for the Kalamazoo Gazette, ESPN and ESPNChicago.com, 247Sports and Blue & Gold Illustrated over the last 12 years and is the publisher of JoeInsider.com. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Centreville and Marcellus face off in a girls basketball nonleague matchup. (Middle) Mendon and Casspolis will bring their football rivalry to the new Southwest 10 Conference. (Photos courtesy of Wes Morgan.)
NFHS Voice: Find Answers at Youth Level
November 13, 2019
By Karissa Niehoff
NFHS Executive Director
Are there long-term solutions to increasing the number of participants in high school sports and improving parental behavior at high school contests? The answer to both questions might start at the youth sports level.
The NFHS hosted a first-ever meeting of about 25 leaders of National Governing Bodies and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee last week to discuss common concerns and opportunities to align and work together.
Within the youth areas of these organizations, the issues are familiar ones to high school leaders – decline in participation, parent behavior, coaches education and minimizing the injury risk. Clearly, however, reaching parents with appropriate educational messages on sportsmanship, injury risk and the values of participation is a top priority for leaders at all levels – youth, middle school and high school sports.
Recently, the NFHS formed a Middle School Committee in an effort to build interest in education-based sports at that level and to share the proper messages with parents before their kids reach high school. However, as we learned last week, middle school may even be too late!
Those educational messages will be enhanced if the process starts in out-of-school youth sports. If messages about the values of multi-sport participation, playing for the love of the game, and limiting contact in sports like football are consistently shared and demonstrated at the youth level, the education-based concept should be firmly in place by the time students reach high school.
Coaches education is another common concern. While the NFHS has created an outstanding online education program for interscholastic coaches through the NFHS Learning Center (www.NFHSLearn.com), there is no standard requirement to coach at the youth level. There should be some type of required certification for anyone to walk onto a field or court to coach. And while knowledge about teaching the proper tackling form in football or the proper defensive positioning in basketball is important, those are not the most important prerequisites for coaching.
Similar to the NFHS’ online Fundamentals of Coaching course, youth coaches should be required to take courses that help them learn how to coach the kids more so than the sport. And since many of the coaches at this level are parents of players on the team, these individuals – and all youth parents – should be presented materials similar to what is presented at preseason meetings at the high school level. This would include, among other things, the non-negotiable requirement to positively support their child while letting the coaches coach, and the officials officiate.
Lofty goals, for sure, without a collective governing organization over youth sports. However, these concepts can be endorsed and promoted within the youth areas of sport-specific NGBs. These fundamentals of education-based athletics are essential for the 2-3 percent who play sports beyond high school as well as the majority who apply the values learned in high school sports in their chosen careers.
The skills will eventually fade – even for those individuals who play sports beyond high school – but the values learned from playing sports, beginning at the youth sports level, will last a lifetime.
Dr. Karissa L. Niehoff is in her second year as executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is the first female to head the national leadership organization for high school athletics and performing arts activities and the sixth full-time executive director of the NFHS, which celebrated its 100th year of service during the 2018-19 school year. She previously was executive director of the Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for seven years.