Montpelier
The likelihood that the Vermont Principals Association’s core four-division sports — soccer, basketball, baseball and softball — will reduce to three has increased with Act 46’s implementation, VPA associate executive director Bob Johnson said during Thursday’s annual media day meeting in the association’s Montpelier office. The VPA is in the second year of a typical two-year alignment plan, with committees just starting work on divisional assignments for the next two-year cycle set to begin in 2019.
Johnson said core sports will continue to have four divisions through 2020-21. Beyond that is anyone’s guess.
“I’m putting it mildly; it’s raising havoc with us and our alignments,” Johnson said. “This past year, we lost four or five schools. We lost in one merger Rochester, Whitcomb, South Royalton and Chelsea, and in return we got a new one in White River Valley that’s come back in. We lost four, bring back one.
“It’s all Division IV schools that we lose. If you saw the baseball (tournament) chart (last spring), there were 10 teams in that tournament. Looking at D-IV, it’s been decimated.”
Chelsea, South Royalton and the Whitcomb-Rochester cooperative all played in spring’s state tourney. Since then, the latter two have officially merged as White River Valley while Chelsea has closed its doors, with students free to choose a new high school destination.
Johnson noted that other D-IV schools are facing similar pressures. Poultney, West Rutland and Proctor are transitioning into the new Quarry Valley Unified Union School District, and while all three towns are retaining their high schools for now, there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. Another D-IV school, Ludlow’s Black River High, is slated to close in two years as the result of an Act 46 vote.
The Danville School near St. Johnsbury and Blue Mountain Union High in Wells River also are feeling consolidation pressures. All play at the D-IV level in the core sports they offer.
“Two years from now, we will have a serious discussion about whether to have three or four divisions,” Johnson said. “If you only have eight schools in Division IV, what do you do with that? Long Trail, Sharon Academy, even Twinfield — these are D-IV schools that won’t have anyone to play.”
Johnson said he was sympathetic to people who have felt a sense of loss with the closing of some schools.
“Consolidation and lessening student enrollment are directly related,” Johnson said. “(Reduced divisional alignment) is the unintended consequence that comes with it, in my mind.”
In other news from Thursday’s discussions:
Johnson said 18 to 20 VPA-affiliated middle schools will now be playing flag football instead of the tackle alternative. It’s the result efforts begun 3½ years ago to react to concerns about injuries, particularly concussions, in the sport.
Flag began first at the fifth- and sixth-grade level, and grades 7 and 8 have since been added. Vermont schools still have some flexibility; Hartford, for instance, fields tackle teams in a New Hampshire league, Johnson noted. But if the contest involves two VPA schools against each other, flag will be employed between rosters of otherwise fully-padded players.
“You can see things are coming down; within the next five years, football will be different,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of movement at the national level on whether to do kickoffs and punt returns. … Whether we’ll go from tackle to flag (at the high school level), that’s a hard one. I don’t think it will. But football will have to prove that it is a safe sport, or as safe as it can be.”
As a result of discussions with the state’s athletic directors, the VPA will clamp down, to some extent, on its member-to-member program.
For more than a decade, member-to-member allowed a struggling school sport to add players from a neighboring school that didn’t offer that sport. Johnson said some schools were concerned others were stockpiling athletes from neighboring schools when they didn’t need them, while other weak programs weren’t getting the help they needed.
Vermont football teams, for example, are considered to have full rosters if they have at least 38 players; those at that number wouldn’t be able to add member-to-member candidates, Johnson said. The decision to enforce the full-roster rule won’t affect athletes returning to programs on which they played in the past.
“We’re going to tell you where your kid will go,” Johnson said. “We want to help programs survive. Member-to-member is year-to-year, and it will never go more than that.”
After a four-year apprenticeship, Ultimate (Frisbee) officially becomes a VPA-sanctioned varsity sport next spring. Meanwhile, bass fishing will make its debut this fall as an exhibition sport.
Johnson admitted surprise at the response he’s received to adding bass fishing, which the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association has sponsored for a couple of years. The Vermont Fish and Game Department and statewide fishermen’s associations have jumped at the chance to help, and 16 schools — including Hartford, Windsor, Woodstock, White River Valley and Oxbow — plan to field teams.
The VPA has set up two tournaments, one on Sept. 15 and a state championship set for Oct. 6, and schools can add meet-ups of their own as well. Both VPA-sponsored events will be staged at Lake Champlain’s John Guilmette Access Area in South Hero.
“It blew my mind the level of support we’ve had for this program,” Johnson said.
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.