The only certainty regarding the Wolverine Conference next season is that it will remain a 12-team league. After that things get a little fuzzy. However, compared to the major changes going on outside that Class B-geared alliance, the Wolverine is still on solid ground.
Wolverine athletic directors, along with Sturgis AD Mark Adams, who will guide the Trojans out of the Southwestern Michigan Athletic Conference and into the Wolverine next fall, met Wednesday and discussed mostly lower priority issues concerning spring and fall sports, with no major news to report. But a wide variety of options are on the table and big decisions must be made concerning the conference’s future membership in the coming months.
Comstock planned to enter the Kalamazoo Valley Association next school year, but developments over the last year have pushed the KVA to the brink of extinction. The Southwestern Athletic Association invited current KVA members Constantine, Schoolcraft, Hackett Catholic Central, Kalamazoo Christian, Delton-Kellogg and Galesburg-Augusta to join what could swell to a 30-team conference in 2015-16 — a move Constantine AD Mike Messner has gone on record saying has a big upside.
The SAC has also invited Wolverine member Coloma, while the new Berrien-St. Joseph-Cass (BCS) league, which will include former St. Joseph Valley programs Mendon, Centreville, White Pigeon and Bronson, has officially invited fellow Wolverine member Berrien Springs. Coloma has also been contacted by the BCS, according to sources.
If both Berrien Springs and Coloma were to leave, which most believe will happen, and Comstock finds a new home (the district has been contacted by the BCS), the Wolverine will drop to 10 teams in 2015-16 if there is no expansion.
“We’d be fine,” said Adams, minutes after Wednesday’s meeting concluded, about the strength of the Wolverine with 10 teams. “You still have a full football schedule and all nine of your opponents in the conference. Everything else would be fine.”
Wolverine Conference secretary Gary Ellis agrees that the league can weather whatever residual effects from surrounding conference realignment.
“The basic, core group of the league is in good shape,” he said Tuesday night. “There are a number of things that could happen. We could have schools leave. We could have teams come in. We could have no change. We’re in a position right now, whatever happens and whatever direction things go, we’re going to be in pretty good shape as a league.”
Paw Paw, Plainwell, Otsego, Vicksburg, Allegan and Sturgis will make up the East Division next year, with the West remaining unchanged with Edwardsburg, Dowagiac, Berrien Springs, South Haven, Coloma and Three Rivers. Some schools have voiced concerns about the current East-West setup, and there could be a vote to move to a North-South breakdown in following years.
Ellis said the Wolverine expects to know more about the intentions of Berrien Springs and Coloma by June 1, which is the rumored deadline the SAC has put in place to hear back from interested parties. But a committee has been selected to start examining all the options in terms of Wolverine expansion. No date has been set for that committee’s first meeting.
“There’s a lot up in the air,” Ellis said. “We want to meet and have principals and superintendents involved so we’re not spinning our wheels; so we’re making some progress on some things. Ultimately, [superintendents] and the boards make the final decisions.”
Though the Wolverine isn’t facing any immediate danger, some are looking to beef up the league in order to avoid potential problems down the road rather than accept a 10-team existence. Others believe dropping to 10 is optimal. Some see what the SAC is doing and believe the Wolverine should also defend itself by drastically increasing its numbers.
“Twelve is a good number,” said first-year Three Rivers AD Pete Anderson, who previously served in the same capacity at Berrien Springs. “But 16 was good because you could afford to lose two or four and 12 is still a good number. When you’re stuck at 12 or 10 and you lose [somebody], then you’re in jeopardy of not having a conference at all. It’s nice to have a little wiggle room in case things were to fall apart a little bit. That was my position going in last year and still is.”
The league couldn’t pass a vote to expand to 16 teams last June, though the landscape has changed significantly in less than a year.
Adams even admits that a Class B super conference in Southwest Michigan, which would include the Wolverine, isn’t farfetched.
“There is some talk, and I’ve been invited myself, to meet with some other ADs that represent several conferences, just to see if we can’t do something here in Southwest Michigan to solidify the conference once and for all — whether it’s a super conference and we’re all in it and we just shift teams around by their enrollment as the years go on,” Adams said. “There are enough ADs that want to see this shuffling of conferences every year or every couple years end so we don’t go through all this stuff and spend all this time trying to figure out where everybody’s going to be.”
Adams and Anderson agree that it might be time to bend the rules in terms of the Wolverine’s somewhat strict stance on only including Class B schools. In fact, there has been some leeway granted already. Sturgis expects to climb to Class A in the next couple years, though the stay might be brief. As long as divisions within a conference are set up to best serve enrollment sizes, they believe a multi-class league is possible.
“We’re kind of running out of eligible Bs, especially if a couple of the Bs that are in Southwest Michigan leave [the Wolverine],” Anderson explained. “Then you kind of get in a battle with the OK [Conference}, which is kind of an established league and is multi-tiered. Is that really our future and how we become stable? That’s the conversation everyone is having.
“There are a few schools toward the lake in Southwest Michigan that might want to join in but they’re on the A-B border. When I came in they said they wanted to stay a B league. Is that really where we stand or do we want to become multi-tiered like the BCS is looking at with a D-C grouping? Those are things we need to look at. Can we stay the way we were when schools aren’t staying the way they were.”
Anderson went on to explain that perhaps more optimal divisional groupings could have kept Comstock from wanting to leave in the first place after feeling it had lost its ability to be competitive in the larger Wolverine schools of the East Division.
Berrien Springs and Coloma are on the low side of B classification, which is the driving force behind their desire to shop around.
“They don’t feel comfortable playing all these big schools all the time,” Adams said. “… For us, with the classes that are coming up, we’re going to be [Class] A for at least two years. If you get everybody settled into a conference, it wouldn’t be a big deal. We’d just shift things around and you play schools of the same size.”
For now, the Wolverine is in a holding pattern until more information is gathered and the special committee has an opportunity to sit down for the first time.