| NJ SPORTS TRAINING |
 |
|
|
|
 |
NJSIAA Realignment Plan Approved
by Brendan Prunty, the Star Ledger
The executive committee of the governing body of high school sports approved a sweeping realignment of leagues and conferences that will impact more than 200 high schools in Central and Northern New Jersey.
The realignment will create six new super conferences impacting schools in Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties in an attempt to address problems involving competitive imbalance, illogically constructed leagues and unnecessarily long travel.
The plan passed by a 30-5 vote with one abstention. It will be implemented in most of the state for the 2009-10 school year. In a final-day compromise, the committee voted to allow superconferences 2 and 3 (comprised mainly of schools in Bergen, Passaic and Hudson counties) to wait until the 2010-11 school year.
Schools in Monmouth, Middlesex and Mercer counties and to the south will not be affected.
The proposal was created and then reworked over a 10-month period by a 34-member Leagues and Conferences Realignment Committee formed by the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA).
It was not approved without some dissent from a number of affected parties.
Prior to the portion of the meeting about the realignment, a letter, signed by 25 principals and athletic directors of the Bergen-Passaic Scholastic League, was distributed. The letter declared a vote of "no confidence" for NJSIAA Executive Director Steve Timko and the Association's attorney Michael Herbet.
Of the 26 speakers that presented arguments for and against the plan to the committee, 15 were not in favor of it, eight were for it and two were split in their opinions. (Representatives from Union and Hackettstown declined to speak. Greg Komeshok, athletic director for Passaic High School, was on the list of scheduled speakers, but was not present.)
Bergen County, which has been the most outspoken of the latest realignment plan, were once again vocal in their opposition.
James Montesano, superintendent for Paramus schools - and representing the Bergen County Association of School Administrators - offered the sternest counter to the proposal.
"Part of our organization's task, currently, is if in fact this organization votes today to move this thing forward, we are in fact, already exploring a number of options that will best serve our interests in the North," Montesano told the Executive Committe. "And unfortunately, it probably is in fact, going to be working against the plan that you are about to put forward. It is that important of an issue to us in the North."
Michael Hughes, a co-chairman on the committee and the principal at North Hunterdon High School, said earlier this summer that the committee had three goals when it met:
-- To fix geographical problems (some current conferences have teams from as many as four different counties) to create more regional rivalries and limit transportation costs;
-- To address competitive balance issues between public and non-public schools that have led to contentious relationships between schools in recent years;
-- To create a flexible schedule program that will enable schools to choose more of their opponents rather than being locked into large division schedules.
"Our goal was to come up with a plan that would have fair competition for all schools," Hughes said in August when it was originally announced.
Hughes said the committee decided to only realign part of the state because, "We came to the conclusion that some of the state was fine," he said.
That's not the case in Northern New Jersey, where acrimony between public and non-public schools in the Northern New Jersey Interscholastic League led to a Dec. 3 proposal to divide the state into public and non-public leagues. When that proposal failed by just eight votes, the NJSIAA realized the issue of competitive balance was felt statewide, not just in the NNJIL.
The public schools in the NNJIL, saying they were tired of being overwhelmed competitively by non-public schools - especially in football - threatened to secede from the conference and the NJSIAA after the vote failed, 186-178.
This realignment is an attempt to solve that problem.
Public schools still will be forced to play non-public powerhouses in their league. The committee, however, said they made divisions small enough that schools would have more open games.
"With the powerhouse teams, we divided them up into divisions that would enable them to schedule more open games," Hughes said. "They have five or six teams in their division and then they can schedule their own other games after those."
In other words, teams would still have to face the powerhouses, but only once.
|
|
