Hello again, everybody. After a couple of hours away from the phone and computer while having dinner with my wife, a few things really stand out to me about what the Lake Conference is doing.

No. 1: The Lake has twisted itself into knots. First, at today’s conference meeting they voted against appealing the MSHSL move to place the four Classic Lake schools into their league. Then they turn around and make it clear that they don’t want all four teams. What is the MSHSL to believe? The first signal from the Lake says, “It’s OK to give us all four teams, otherwise we would appeal that decision.” But they also are threatening the MSHSL by saying, “If you don’t change your mind, we’re bolting and leaving Eden Prairie hanging in the lurch with the Classic Lake schools.”

No. 2: Lake leadership has fouled this up from the start. Months ago, several meetings were held with representatives from conferences all over the metro in an attempt to fix this problem before the MSHSL was forced to place the four schools. Those meetings were off-limits to the media, but I have been told by people who where in the room that the leadership of the Lake Conference showed no interest in working with other leagues to try and solve this. The Lake attitude seemed to be along the lines of, “We’ll take care of ourselves.” That’s one reason why there is little sympathy for the Lake now from people in other conferences. They could have tried to avoid this situation, but chose not to.

No. 3: The MSHSL cannot be blamed for this. The high school league does not have the authority to force schools to change conferences or demand that conferences do anything along those lines. As far as conference membership goes, all the MSHSL can do is take schools that are not in conferences (for whatever reason) and place them into existing conferences. And that’s what the MSHSL is doing with the Classic Lake schools.

No. 4: Eden Prairie belongs with Edina, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Wayzata. It only makes sense for those five mega-schools to be in the same conference. Their enrollments are large, their economics are similar, and the geography makes sense. Five schools makes for one troubled conference, of course, which is why I argued long ago for another two or three large-enrollment schools to step up and volunteer to join that group of five. Maple Grove? Blaine? Champlin Park? It probably doesn’t matter now, because no schools are jumping in to make this happen.

I don’t know what the future holds. But it’s a very safe bet that the Lake Conference is headed for a new look, which won’t do anything to solve the real problems.

John Millea is on Twitter at www.twitter.com/stribjohn

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.