Third Draft from the State Association on how the schools would go/come together in the Fall of 2017 and there does not seem to be too many changes from what we saw from Draft #2/Round 2 and we see today, in Round 3/Draft #3…
Conference I 4-A:
Grimsley
High Point Central
Northwest Guilford
Page
Ragsdale…..You end up with 4 conference games in football…
Conference G 3-A:
Dudley
Smith
Mt. Tabor
North Forsyth
WS Parkland
Southwest Guilford
Western Guilford
Conference H 3-A:
Asheboro
Eastern Guilford
Southeast Guilford
Southern Alamance
Southern Guilford
Southwest Randolph
Burlington Williams….They need to get Eastern Guilford back in there with Northern and Northeast….
Conference I 3-A:
Eastern Alamance
McMichael
Morehead
Northeast Guilford
Northern Guilford
Person
Rockingham County
Western Alamance
Conference P 2-A:
Eastern Randolph
Jordan Matthews
Providence Grove
Randleman
High Point Andrews
Trinity
Wheatmore
Simply don’t understand how they couldn’t come up with something other than a 5 team 4A conference (NW, Grimsley, Page, HPC, Ragsdale). I might have missed one, but it is the only proposed 5 team conference that I see in the entire state at any classification. It seems to me that it will cause a scheduling nightmare for all sports. There are split conferences all over the place, and I see that Guilford County requested a split conference arrangement, but it must have been denied. Seems stupid.
@NWGHS fan There’s also a five-team football conference that includes Reidsville, Cummings and Graham. It’s a seven-school conference, but two of the schools (Durham School of the Arts and NC School of Science & Math) don’t play football, so that’s messed up, too.
The NCHSAA essentially gave a big middle finger to all the football schools in those two leagues. How are they going to be able to find enough nonconference opponents once everybody else gets into their conference schedules?
Heard Forsyth Schools offered to do a binding legal agreement with that 5 team Guilford Conference for non-conference games in football and the Guilford Schools turned it down. Anyone else hear that?
Scheduling will also be difficult in sports other than football, though football will probably be the toughest, since there is only 1 game/week allowed.
I just read on the N&R high school sports blog that Guilford Co submitted a proposal for 2 split 3A/4A conferences with teams from Guilford and Forsyth. Such proposals have to be approved by all schools affected. The Forsyth 3A teams rejected the proposal. The NCHSAA takes the position that the schools have to work things out. So, NCHSAA created this problem by restructuring how the classifications are determined, proposed new conference alignments, then dumps it on the schools to work out a problem they didn’t create. Good system.
Split conferences have problems, too. Among other things, they screw up seedings for state playoffs, in that some bad teams get unreasonably high seedings (e.g. Watuaga boys basketball the last 2 years). But a 5 team conference is dumb.
It seems if all involved were to sit down and be open minded to change, there can be a solution.
Maybe GCS could change the attendance zones at a couple of schools by shifting a few students to some of the larger 3A schools. This would in essence keep them 4A. That would be seven 4A schools in the same conference.