The Lake is sending mixed signals (and other notes)
Posted on June 29th, 2009 – 10:07 PMBy John Millea
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
6 Responses to "The Lake is sending mixed signals (and other notes)"
What you end up with is a new “Classic Lake” conference (Minus Armstrong, Plus EP) which is what created the problem in the first place. The 5 school conference doesn’t work when you have 30 BB games and 12 football games and god knows how many hockey, baseball etc… games.
With a 5 team conference you end up with 4 home and 4 away football games - that leaves you with 4 non-conference games to schedule - Not bad until you try to find opponents - because the teams you want to play are all in 8, 10 or 12 team conferences and only have 1 or 2 non-conference slots open. That’s the crux of the issue here.
What you end up is a clusterF***. Since the MSHSL has no authority over the conferences (other than to place teams that don’t have a home) you end up with a conference that says fine - you place 4 teams with us - we’ll all just quit and leave you right where you started. The conferences don’t want these for “super” schools for various reasons (Wayzata / EP for FB, Hopkins BB, Edina - Tennis, FB)
If you had a strong MSHSL - then they could step in and say - Here’s the conferences that make sense. Done. But instead you’ve got local AD’s (athletic / activity directors) and admins making the call who’s salaries and continued employment mean winning conference championships and bragging rights. And don’t say that doesn’t happen at the HS Level. It absolutely does.
And one last thing - just for the record… Wayzata is declining in enrollment. Check the records folks..before you call for them to split into two high schools. Last year - Kindergarten enrollment in the district was 600 give or take a few. Graduating class was 928. That’s a net loss of 328 or so students… or at $2,500 per kid - $820,000 to the district. Also - just in case you don’t get it… if they were to decide to split into 2 High Schools - It would be a minimum of 5 years before the new HS would be up and running. Land would have to be acquired,plans drawn and approved, bonding and operating funds approved, school built, and staff hired. Then there’d be the year long process of determining / dividing the district so Johnny and his friends go to the “right” school. Not a short term fix or a long term fix.
Dave,
do some fact-finding. The MSHSL has NO authority to come in and re-arrange conferences. They couldn’t if they wanted to. They followed the process layed out by the state legislature and that placement process resulted in the 4 Classic Lake schools going south. Wayzata’s enrollment is FLAT - they gain enough students thru OPEN ENROLLMENT to off-set their lower kindergarten numbers. Don’t worry about Wayzata declining…they’ll be just fine. MILLEA has it right in his four bullet points. The LAKE fouled this up from the get-go.
WhataboutBob -
You should re-read my post - I know that MSHSL has no authority to re-align conferences - What I said is “We Need a STRONG MSHSL” one that cut through all of the BS and realign conferences. We don’t have that today. Instead we get a bunch of petty in-fighting.
Second - I know that Wayzata is flat enrollment wise - My point was that there is not enough growth to support the clowns on this forum that suggest 2 Wayzata HS’s. Ain’t going to happen.
You really need to read the post… also do some research of your own… The Open Enrollee’s don’t pay Wayzata taxes. They pay taxes to their district and then the state makes up the funding with a flat per student dollar amount. So - we get 320 kids to open enroll - we don’t gain the taxes and levies that the district has in place we get the flat amount.
And yes - Millea has it right - the lake conference fouled this up from the get go… with help from a lot of others.
I’m not just letting the Lake off the hook, but I think everyone’s piling on a little bit here.
People from other conferences can cry foul all they want, but I don’t exactly see anyone else stepping up to try and help either. Everyone wants to blame the Lake, but nobody (Lake or other conferences) wants to add new powerhouses (let alone 4) to their conference that will come in and dominate everyone else. The Lake is unfortunately a circumstance of geography and similar enrollments, but the majority of the current Lake teams (other than EP) aren’t going to be able to compete with these added schools, at least not regularly.
And I’m not blaming the megaschools either - they have every right to try and compete at the highest of levels, and they’ve all been successful doing so. But by suddenly asking AV, Eastview, Lakeville, Burnsville, Rosemount, etc to take 4 more EP-like schools, that are regularly at the top in most major sports, it’s understandable why they wouldn’t welcome them all with open arms.
Again, the Lake has had missteps along the way, there’s no denying that. But they’ve also reacted in pretty much the same way that any other conference would. No one wants to sign up to regularly get their tail kicked…
So the problem is that we have 5 “mega schools”.
Solution-Put them in a conference, add Cretin (who despite enrollment numbers around 1400, is clearly in a unique competitive situation, able to bring in talent from across the city of St. Paul). Require, as part of the deal keeping them out of their conferences, that the Lake and Northwest Suburban schedule games against these schools that would substitute for an 8 team conference. Adjustments can be made down the line if growing Shakopee (currently 1700), Prior Lake (2000) add sufficient numbers or a merged Bloomington School join the super conference.
We are in this mess because years ago Edina, Tonka, Wayzata and Hopkins broke away from the Lake Conference without telling the rest of the member schools. That’s the sore spot in all of this. This is why the rest of the Lake (hardly looks like the Lake as most of the schools are below the Minnesota River) hates those schools. They broke away to form the Classic Lake to GET AWAY from the larger Dakota County schools because Rosemount area schools were on top. Classic Lake schools lost their credibility the moment they did it and their good will is gone. I like Eden Prairie and Mike Grant (Bloomington Lincoln grad), but they need to form two or three football teams : Eden Prairie Black and Eden Prairie Red. I’ve seen this done at New Trier High School in the North Shore of Chicago in hockey and it worked really well and they remained super competitive. It would be fun to see as they have so much talent, great youth system and coaching.
