Scott Swanson
How about a 2½-hour freeway trip to Sutherlin instead of that treacherous trek to La Pine?
That’s the latest option on the table for Sweet Home, courtesy of the OSAA Classification and Districting Committee, which met April 30 to come up with the latest realignment plan for Oregon high school sports and activities conferences.
But Sweet Home High School Athletic Director Steve Brown predicts it will be a while before anything gets set in concrete.
After a closed-session meeting the 16-member committee announced that they had received a petition from La Pine, which currently has a student population of 414, to move down to the 3A division. That would allow the Hawks to compete in the PacWest Conference, which includes Pleasant Hill, Creswell, Harrisburg, Scio, Jefferson and Santiam Christian.
Under that plan, four leagues would see at least one school leave or be added with the goal of maintaining six schools per league wherever possible, according to an OSAA report on the meeting.
To keep the Sky-Em Conference at six teams, the OSAA is proposing to move Sutherlin from the Far West League, which includes Douglas and several coastal schools, to the Sky-Em, whose other members are Cottage Grove, Elmira, Junction City and Sisters.
That’s a difference of about 26 miles, but it’s a positive change, time-wise, said Kevin Strong, Sweet Home School District business manager, who was a leader in the school’s failed attempt to avoid a move to the Sky-Em five years ago. School officials and parents cited concerns then about the safety of Highway 20, particularly in the winter time, on trips to Sisters and La Pine.
He said he had not crunched the numbers, but Strong guesstimated that such a change would reduce time coaches and students would be out of the classroom and he said that, overall, it would be better for Sweet Home.
“For student safety, we would be very appreciative of being able to trade going to Sutherlin than to La Pine,” Strong said. “It may only be 25 miles difference, but even with good weather conditions it’s probably an hour longer. That means students are getting home sooner.
“I’m all for Sutherlin.”
However, Brown said Friday, nothing’s settled – not by a long shot.
Brown said that after the committee issued its report, e-mails began to fly and “people are throwing things out right and left.”
“I don’t have a clue about what’s going on,” he said in reference to any kind of final resolution.
One problem, Brown said, is that schools such as Sisters are not happy with a plan that would force them to cross the Cascades to play all their away games in the Willamette Valley. Sutherlin isn’t happy either, he said.
One suggestion in the last week has been to move Siuslaw, in Florence, into the Sky-Em instead of Sutherlin, but that isn’t going to play well with current Sky-Em members, he said.
“I looked and it’s only three miles difference (between Sutherlin and Siuslaw), but straight down I-5 as opposed to get over the Coast Range in the winter, for us, Sutherlin is way faster.”
It appears certain that La Pine is gone, he said. “There were four criteria and La Pine met all four,” he said.
One of the questions that will influence the outcome for all the local leagues is whether Taft follows suit. The Tigers are currently in the Oregon West Conference with Cascade, Central Newport, Philomath and Stayton, but Taft has less than half the student population of Central and is well below the other league members and Brown said the prevailing opinion is that the Tigers may well be in line to follow La Pine’s lead. Plus, La Salle in Clackamas, which is currently a 5A school, has expressed interest in dropping back to 4A, while Yamhill-Carlton apparently is also interested in moving down to 3A, which would re-jigger the arrangement, he said.
“It’s nuts,” Brown said.
There has been talk of moving Sisters to the Tri-Valley Conference, and moving Philomath and Sutherlin into the Sky-Em.
“It would be a hard sell to have teams from Cascade and Stayton drive right through Philomath to go to Newport,” he said, noting some of the drawbacks of the plan.
“I would like to stay right around here, but the trouble is everybody on the other side of the 5, they hate coming through here to Sisters and La Pine.”
Plus, he said, constantly having to cross the mountains makes things even tougher for the eastern schools.
“That’s brutal. We only have to do it a couple of times. They have to do it every week.”
It will take time to sort out the landscape, Brown said.
“Until they come out with who’s 4A and who’s 3A, nothing can be set in stone.”
And people are going to unhappy somewhere, he predicted.
“I see the point; they try to do what’s best for everybody. It’s a hard job. I wouldn’t want to do it. But you can’t please everybody. Someone’s going to be mad.”