NE league will drop north-south divide

Format for football season next year will return to a single NE league lineup. The north and south divisions of the league will be dropped because of the number of teams which have dropped out and made one lineup of league schools small enough to fit into a season’s football schedule, Coach Mike Morgan reported at Tuesday’s football banquet.

For this season, the NE-North had just four teams with Springdale and Wilbur/Creston dropping out of NE action. The NE-South was made up of five teams with Colfax, Liberty, Reardan, Lind/Ritzville/Sprague and Asotin.

The split for the NE sent member teams scrambling to fill out the season schedules by booking non-league foes. Prior to the split, with the league lineup full, NE teams played a fall schedule with all the other teams in the league.

Colfax during the league split booked non-leaguers with Freeman; Heppner, Ore .; Wakiaikum, and others.

Coach Morgan said the football campaign next year figures to allow teams one non-league foe and one bye with the remainder of game dates booked for a run through the schedule before the playoffs.

Also the WIAA next year will go through the classification count and determine breakouts for the different divisions with the possibility of 1A teams with smaller counts coming down into the 2B division and smaller 2B schools dropping down to 1B.

Those changes could also impact future football schedules.

The state 2B division this year was made up of 60 teams.

The size for 2B ranges from 83 to 214.9. Four schools in the division are under the 83 minimum and opted to play up. One of those teams, DeSales, decided this year to go to 1B.