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Yeah, mister, I know exactly where you can put that headstone. Try “away.”
The name on the headstone is “Allen County Athletic Conference,” and because of it I can tell the alarmists have been in your ear, whispering dire tales of plunging enrollments and wholesale defections. I can almost hear, in their voices, the soft, lethal sound dominoes make when they start to fall.
Let me say this about that: There’s a reason alarmists are called alarmists.
It’s because they’re in the business of turning molehills into, I don’t know, the Himalayas or something.
Look: The ACAC is not falling because there are a couple of classes down in the elementary grades at Southern Wells that are less than fully populated. It’s just not.
All it means is that athletic director Kevin Lavanchy and football coach Mark Lefebvre are looking two or three years down the road and seeing some lean Friday nights coming. For that reason, the Raiders – your 2008 ACAC champs and a solid 5-2 in the conference this season – are dropping Leo, Woodlan and Heritage from their schedule next season.
That will make them an independent, ineligible for the ACAC title.
“It wasn’t a dissatisfaction with the games we were playing,” Lefebvre said this week, as his 9-2 Raiders prepared to play at Southwood tonight for a sectional title. “That didn’t have anything to do with it. It was our fear that at some point we weren’t gonna be competitive.”
The projected numbers would seem to back him up. When Lavanchy and Lefebvre started looking at it three or four years ago, two of the elementary classes numbered fewer than 50 kids. Projecting that out, it meant by 2012-13, Southern Wells was looking at roughly 218 students in four grades. It has 250 this year.
“What we were running into trouble with is we were getting to where two years ago we didn’t have enough kids to play our peewee team,” says Lefebvre, whose 2010 schedule adds Fremont, Delta and Monroe Central, which just started varsity ball. “This year we barely had enough kids to play (middle school ball).”
And yet, again: The sky is not falling.
“I don’t think it’s gonna have a lot of impact (on the future of the conference),” Woodlan athletic director Denny Meisle says. “They’re still gonna play some of the teams.”
What might have an influence is if Southern Wells – which is dropping out in football only, and, according to ACAC bylaws can rejoin the conference in football in two years – stays away for good, and if East Allen County Schools decides to close a school or two. A recommendation on that issue is supposed to land on the superintendent’s desk next spring; if Woodlan would happen to be one of those recommended for closing, that might start the ACAC dominoes tumbling.
The alarmists would say this is exactly what’s going to happen.
We non-alarmists say large alien bunnies will invade Earth and make us their slaves first.
I’m a devout worshipper at the altar of history, and history says it’s highly unlikely EACS will do anything. It never does. Talking about it is just something the school system does on occasion.
And so: Put that headstone away, mister.
You are way early for this funeral. Way early.
