AUGUSTA, Maine — One sure sign of the changing nature of the state’s high school sports rivalries involves the rise of cooperative sports teams and more changes may be forthcoming.
When one school might not have enough players to field a particular team, it now looks to neighbors that perhaps a generation ago wouldn’t have thought for a second about helping an opponent they battle both competitively and emotionally in other sports.
But from that historical perspective has evolved such current-day cooperation as boys high school hockey programs representing Portland-Deering, Old Town-Orono, Houlton-Hodgdon-Southern Aroostook-Katahdin and Lawrence-Skowhegan.
The addition of cooperative sports teams in recent years has saved some programs from potential elimination while providing numerous student-athletes from smaller schools who might not otherwise have had the chance to play a particular sport more competitive options.
The use of cooperative sports teams in Maine is most pronounced in ice hockey. Fourteen of the 40 boys varsity ice hockey teams statewide this winter are composed of two or more schools, including 11 of the 20 programs in Class A.
The percentage is even greater for the fledgling sport of girls ice hockey — 10 of the 16 varsity teams around the state are cooperative entries.
Similar joint ventures also are found on occasion in other sports, and the Maine Principals’ Association vote last spring to relax its cooperative-team policy to include all its activities — previously the practice wasn’t allowed in activities in which a student may win both an individual state championship and a team state title — figures to expand the practice in a state trying to make the best of a steady enrollment decline.
One issue that may slow that rate of expansion involves how the enrollments of participating schools in a cooperative team are used in the classification process.
Currently the total enrollment of each school contributing to a cooperative team is combined to determine classification, even though in many cases the smaller schools in a co-op often contribute a very small percentage of players to the squad.
That has led to reluctance by some schools to develop cooperative teams for fear the added full enrollment from a second or third participating school would bump the team up one or even two classes from where the lead school competes as an individual entity.
The MPA’s ice hockey committee is now studying the issue in search of an alternative to using the full school enrollment to determine cooperative-team classification.
“There are so many schools in ice hockey and with the girls teams starting to come in, too, with co-ops that this seemed like a good place to start,” said Bill MacManus, chair of the MPA hockey committee and athletic administrator at Lawrence High School of Fairfield. “Some co-ops will join together and might get just one or two hockey players out of one of the schools, but when the enrollments are combined it puts that team in Class A rather than it being a Class B school.”
MacManus said his committee hopes to develop during the next year a plan that would address differently how enrollment plays into the classification of cooperative hockey teams and forward any recommendations to the MPA classification committee for consideration in advance of the next two-year statewide classification cycle that starts with the 2017-2018 academic calendar.
The classification committee could support or reject any proposal for hockey, or even recommend expanding the proposal’s reach to include more MPA activities.
“It’s a little easier to look at it with hockey because there aren’t as many teams,” said MacManus. “Then if we come up with a recommendation we would forward that to the classification committee because they’re the ones that set all those guidelines.
“Then they could put it out to the membership to vote on something like that.”
A Connecticut template?
A sampling of interscholastic cooperative team policies from other New England states finds that most are similar to Maine’s, though some states use other criteria in addition to enrollment to determine classification.
But a policy employed by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference may provide a template for Maine officials.
Under the CIAC policy, if a cooperative boys or girls varsity roster has two-thirds of its players from the host school and one-third from a second school, a similar enrollment proportion is used to determine classification. In this case the full enrollment of boys or girls in grades 9-12 from the largest school would be combined with one-third of the second school’s 9-12 boys or girls enrollment.
“It had some merits,” said MacManus. “When we first talked about it we said we needed to see more of the pluses and minuses.
“It’s just like anything else, what would fit in Maine might not fit in Connecticut or vice versa, but what our committee has talked about is let’s take a look at this and see what else we can come up with and see how it affects not only the players but the coaches and teams.”
More than a hockey issue
Should the hockey committee come up with a different approach for using enrollment to determine a cooperative team’s classification, it could result in that approach being applied to other MPA activities.
There already are situations where a different standard might be beneficial.
Take the fledgling Ellsworth-Sumner cooperative football program.
If the two neighboring high schools fielded separate teams, Ellsworth (459 students) and Sumner of East Sullivan (248) each would be in Class D North, though Sumner by itself does not have enough players to field its own squad.
As a cooperative entry, the combined enrollment of 707 places the team in Class B North, where it would face a schedule of much larger single-school programs such as Brunswick, Lawrence, Brewer, Messalonskee of Oakland, Cony of Augusta and Skowhegan.
Given that the current Ellsworth-Sumner entry is just four years old and didn’t win a game in its first three seasons, school officials opted to play down in Class D in both 2015 and 2016 and absorb the penalty of not being eligible for postseason play rather than compete up two classes and face a daunting schedule that might jeopardize the program’s viability.
“It would be great if there was a way to take a percentage of the enrollment based on how many kids were playing rather than having to use the total enrollment,” said Ellsworth-Sumner football coach Duane Crawford, whose team finished with a 6-2 record in Class D North last fall. “We just don’t have 50 kids on our roster to play a Brunswick or a Lawrence.
“But you don’t want to tell kids whether it’s hockey or basketball or any other sport that they can’t play. You hate to deny them that opportunity to play a sport that they’re not going to get anywhere else.”
This past fall Ellsworth-Sumner had 29 players on its roster, all but two from Ellsworth High School.
That fact raises the question of whether it’s worth remaining a cooperative entry when the current commitment ends after 2016 and either playing up one or two classes or playing down without the chance to compete in postseason play, or whether it would be better for Ellsworth to proceed individually in either Class C or Class D based on its own enrollment.
Ellsworth’s enrollment for the current two-year cycle is the maximum allowed for a Class D football program.
“We’ll have to make a decision after this year,” said Ellsworth athletic administrator Josh Frost. “Do we stay with our cooperative team and if we’re given the opportunity to stay in Class D we’d still be ineligible for the playoffs, or if they say we’re no longer eligible for Class D but if we want to keep Sumner, we’ll probably have to move up to Class B, which puts us with schools like Hampden and Brewer that have been around [football] for a long time.
“We are ultimately going to have that discussion.”
That discussion might be made easier if a new enrollment formula for determining classification is developed in the interim.
“People say that at some point you’ve got to play where you’re supposed to be and if you can’t make it, you can’t make it,” said Crawford, “but that doesn’t do anything to foster the sport. It drives teams out.
“It would be nice if the MPA could find a way to keep kids involved without penalizing the programs and bumping them up to a place where they just can’t compete.”
