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Oregon Road Conditions & Cams Email Story to a Friend October 25, 2005 Committee’s plan fails to meet two of the three goals it was after Prep Notebook By DON HUNT Mail Tribune The rubber hit the road in Wilsonville Monday: High school athletics as we’ve known them for several decades will undergo a major change beginning next fall. If you live in Redmond, warm up the bus and make sure it’s full of fuel before embarking on weekly 260-mile round trips to Salem. If your kids attend either of the Medford schools, get ready for regular visits to Eugene for conference games. The new Southern Oregon Conference will join Sheldon and South Eugene high schools with Roseburg, Grants Pass, North Medford and South Medford. Ashland, Crater and Eagle Point will hook up with Klamath Union and Mazama to form another new league. It’s all part of the Oregon School Activities Association reclassification plan that will see the state expand from four classifications to six. As expected, the OSAA executive board approved a recommendation Monday from a committee that has put its heads together for the past 13 months drawing up a plan that would improve competitive balance. Advertisement The committee also presumably had two other objectives in mind: minimize travel and expenses and maintain current league alignments whenever feasible. I believe they failed on the latter two counts. Few would argue that the current four-class system has flaws. The greatest shortcoming has been in the Class 4A ranks, where schools like Klamath Union, with an enrollment of 938 students, has had to go against the two Medford schools, Grants Pass and Roseburg, with enrollments roughly twice that size. But when you get down to the brass tacks, the real problem has been in football, where the quantity of athletes means a great deal. That’s why schools like Klamath Union and Woodburn have dropped out of their 4A football conferences in recent years to play independent schedules rather than get their teeth kicked in. But rather than tweak the system with a ball-peen hammer, the OSAA whacked it with a sledgehammer. "They could have tweaked things to meet the needs of the schools that have struggled," said South Medford athletic director Dennis Murphy. "Why they had to make such drastic changes is beyond me." I was surprised to learn last week that the school with the second-lowest enrollment in the SOC — Ashland — had won the most conferences titles (14) the past three years. And that the school with the second-highest enrollment — Grants Pass — hadn’t won any over that span. Ashland is one of the few cities in Oregon that has passed a levy that funds sports and other extracurricular activities in its schools. Think that has anything to do with the Grizzlies’ success? A couple of proposals that fell into the redistricting committee’s gutter made a lot of sense. One was a five-classification, football-only proposal. Locally, that would have separated Ashland, Crater, Eagle Point and Klamath Union from the bigger schools in football but brought all the SOC schools together in the other sports. Some thought that plan to be unwieldy, but I thought it had merit because it addressed the big elephant in the room — football. An even better proposal was one that was forwarded to the OSAA by Rogue River High principal Dave Orr. His plan called for a five-class system that maintained the integrity of current leagues far better than the six-class system the OSAA adopted. And in doing so, it prevented schools like Sheldon, South Eugene and Redmond, which has been placed in a league with Salem schools, from traveling thousands of extra miles. Another advantage to a five-class plan is that each of its districts would comprise six or seven schools. Under the OSAA’s six-class format, many districts have only five schools. One district — in eastern Oregon — has but four. A four-team league? That’s absurd. But regardless of whether you like the new approach or not, it’s here to stay through the 2009-2010 school year. "We’ll just have to move forward and see how it works," says Crater High athletic director John Beck. "And at this point, we have no choice." So get used to it. And warm up the bus. Reach reporter Don Hunt at 776-4469, or e-mail Committee�s plan fails to meet two of the three goals it was after ">[email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2005 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. 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