It must be season for league juggling

This is it for the year.

This weekend the last of the 2004-2005 state titles will be decided. Next week in this space there will be pictures of the Greater Spokane League’s best.

Then summer.

Baseball season. No, wait. Basketball season. Football season? Soccer? Tennis? Cross country?

Or as a coach once told my son who was missing a summer basketball matchup for a Legion game, “It’s summer. It’s nothing season.”

Nothing season? It’s really everything season. If you are one of those athletes trying to get to everything, my heart goes out to you.

But before we can get you into everything season, we have to look at the future of the GSL and to a smaller degree, the Great Northern League.

It all starts 180 miles away.

Monday, the Kennewick School District is scheduled to make a decision concerning its high schools’ classifications.

Does that matter in Spokane?

Sure. If the district allows Southridge and Kamiakin to move to the 3A classification when the WIAA adds the sixth class in 2006, the face of Eastern Washington big-school sports will change.

If the first word that popped into your head is why, I’ll try to explain.

Southridge and Kamiakin have been 3A size for a while. But Kennewick is 4A, and the district has insisted all three schools remain together. But as the classifications grow from five to six in 2006, the district is at least entertaining the notion of allowing the two schools to play at their correct level.

If that occurs, the Big Nine Conference would probably have to adopt the GSL model of a combined 4A/3A league. That would allow Hanford, which has declared its intentions of moving up to 4A to enter the Big Nine, and West Valley (Yakima) to stay 3A and join the Big Nine. Add Sunnyside, which will be a 3A school in the 2A CWAC, and the central part of the state would have five 3A schools.

With five 3A schools in the Yakima River Valley, it would make it more inviting for GSL schools to play 3A.

If Kamiakin and Southridge move up, Hanford probably will too, leaving only Yakima’s West Valley and Sunnyside in the 3A ranks. That would make it tough for the GSL’s 3A schools come playoff time, because the fewer schools on this side of the state, the greater chance even first-round playoff games could be held on the other side of the Cascades.

No matter what the Kennewick district decides, the GSL is asking West Valley (our West Valley), Clarkston and Cheney to make a decision about their future by the league meeting on June 20. If those schools want to stay 3A – which would probably mean moving up for all three because they should be 2A size under the new guidelines – the GSL wants a strong commitment about that. This would allow the league to begin scheduling for 2006 (yes, it starts that early).

The trio has asked the GSL about staying in the league even if they choose to be 2A schools, but the league will probably say no, because there is an outstanding alternative in the area, the 2A Great Northern. Add Cheney, Clarkston and West Valley to the larger GNL schools and you have maybe the strongest 2A league in the state, and a league that resembles the old Frontier League.

So what do the Kennewick schools have to do with this? Say Southridge and Kamiakin go 3A and there are five schools in that class in the central part of the state. That would make it more inviting for the Mead schools to be 3A (if they qualify) because there could be as many as 10 3A schools on this side of the mountains (NC and East Valley are for sure and Cheney could be). That would probably mean three playoff berths would stay in Eastern Washington.

If the Kennewick schools stay 4A? Then there could be as few as four 3A schools (NC, EV, Yakima’s West Valley and Sunnyside) , which would mean long trips for every playoff encounter.

All this should be decided over the next six months. And you thought summer was the “off” season for prep sports.