Times are changing: Six CVAC teams set for high school football
· Yahoo Sports
PLATTSBURGH — And then there were six.
In less than a week, the Champlain Valley Athletic Conference gets underway with games across the North Country. Sports are finally back on the schedule.
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But it took time to get here. As teams were preparing for the upcoming season, there were still questions as to who would match up early in the season.
It caused teams to learn on the fly with little time to know who they would focus on.
“We're trying to prep and plan and put together a logical sequence of installation for our different sides of the ball, and sometimes you do that based on who your initial opponents are,” Saranac Lake head coach Eric Bennett said. “When you don't know that, that certainly makes for a little bit of tenuous planning.”
Bennett spoke in early August when the schedule was still in the air. There were rumblings at the time, but nothing was official that had a schedule in place. Time was ticking.
Section VII Football coordinator Pat Keleher was doing everything he could to get things finalized.
“There were a lot of challenges,” Keleher said. “The first challenge was AuSable Valley dropped out, and they did it early … they notified the section that they were going to go JV and modified only this year. So at that point, we thought, we know everybody's got a week off. So schools went out looking for games, and Beekmantown and Saranac Lake found games with teams out of Vermont.
“A month or more later, or two later, Ticonderoga (informs us) they’re also dropping. And so now we're down to six. We could have just redrawn a schedule where everybody would have played somebody a second time twice. But, with those two Vermont games, we’d have five teams with an open date; someone is not going to play.”
Section II was an option to split games, but they’re also dealing with numbers issues.
"They've had five schools declare to play eight-man football,” Keleher said. “Then there were five other schools that were going to play eight-man because of a lack of numbers and Section II ended up with an even number of teams for 11-man. So they just essentially redrew their schedules, moving the two remaining Ds up into the C schedule, and they did a little shuffling, and so they didn't have any open dates for us.”
Teams such as Cambridge, a perennial power in Section II, folded their program for at least a year. Other schools merged with each other to consolidate. Stillwater also condensed due to a player enrolling early in college, and other players chose to give up on the season.
And it’s a new normal.
“I think it's the new normal,” Bennett said. “I don't want to speak for other communities, but I do feel like football is a very difficult game to play because you know you practice four or five days, you get one game, then you repeat. Whereas, you know your baseball, lacrosse, soccer. Once you get out of preseason, it's a game, a practice, two games, two practices, and the intervals between practice and games are much shorter.
“I just think the demands of football are a lot, and I think kids are changing to some degree in terms of what their interests are and what they like to do. So I do think that this is the way it's going to be for a while.”
And that normal means a schedule is going to be adjusted on a yearly basis.
“The last four to five years, that's exactly what we've had to do,” Keleher said. “I honestly don't remember the last time we had an eight-team football schedule. We've had to redraw a schedule every year now for the last four or five years because of one issue or another. It's kind of evolved around Ticonderoga not having enough, and then declaring that they were going to have to go to eight-man.
“I don't know if we'll ever safely be able to say that all eight schools are going to be able to field 11-man football without any number issues.”
Peru head coach Ryon O’Connell agreed.
“It's just going to be every year,” he said. “I think it's going to be you're going to have to juggle JV and varsity combined, not combined, or play Monday games as Saranac Lake is doing to make sure they have a varsity team. It's just every year. It could be a different school in that situation.
“It’s just the reality. [Section VII] redrew the schedule a number of times. It falls on us to help everybody in the area. It’s the new norm that we’re going to be dealing with in the future. We just have to be able to go with the flow and try to help each school district out.”
And that will adjust numbers may be dwindling and coaches are offering their concerns. Kids have more options now with the addition of golf being added to the fall schedule.
“At the coaches’ meeting, there were some head coaches that expressed worry (about numbers),” Keleher said. “0In the last 10 years, every one of our schools, with maybe the exception at Saranac and Beekmantown, have shrunk in size. 20 years ago, Peru was on the verge of being Class A football; now they’re eight students away from being Class C. Plattsburgh High is four students from being Class C.
“Ticonderoga used to be right on the bubble between Class D. Now it's not even close; they're a small D as is Moriah. Most districts are shrinking and there are fewer students to fill with soccer, football and cross country rosters are smaller and now you’re adding golf to the fall.”
As schools get smaller, so does the section. O’Connell knows it just brings everyone closer together as they’re in it together. Peru actually starts the season off with a Thursday night tilt against Potsdam at Franklin Academy.
“I think you know Pat and the section worked very hard to make the schedule as you know equal or you know enough for each team,” O’Connell said. There's a lot of different things going on within the schedule that everybody had to work through, but I think we know the final schedule that we ended with is a good one, and you know I look forward to getting to work with the kids.”