District 6 swim meet moved back to CWU

MOSES LAKE - At the start of the fall sports season the District 6 Championships for girls swimming was scheduled to be held at Moses Lake High School.

After appeals from District 5 and 7, the meet appears to be headed back to Central Washington University in Ellensburg.

The original plan was to have the 4A schools compete in Moses Lake and have the smaller classifications continue to compete at CWU. However, representatives from District 5 and 7 voiced concerns over schools with co-op swim teams splitting resources.

"That was the premise of their argument," Moses Lake athletic director Loren Sandhop said. "We're going to end up splitting coaching staffs if we send part of the group to Moses Lake and part of the group to Central."

Moses Lake girls swimming co-ops with Ephrata and Sandhop did offer some solutions for schools with a similar situation. Sandhop suggested that schools with co-op teams could send a different coach with each squad or expand the district meet to include the weekend of Nov. 7 and 8, as western Washington schools compete the week before state.

Sandhop also explained that if the meet was held in Moses Lake then the seven Columbia Basin Big Nine schools could use the pool for free, leaving only Richland and Walla Walla required to pay a usage fee.

At Central, the CBBN schools would be responsible for renting out the pool for multiple days.

But those ideas weren't acceptable to District 5, according to Sandhop.

The idea of the split came about because school officials were concerned about hosting every classification at Moses Lake High School due to the district meet beginning on Thursday, a school day. Accommodating extra cars, teams and spectators would be a tall task.

When the representatives from each district couldn't reach an agreement, the issue was turned over to executive director Mike Colbrese with the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association.

The WIAA sided with District 5 and 7, citing the issues that came with splitting coaching staffs up, and moved the meet back to CWU.

Colbrese said an intervention by the WIAA was unusual and only occurs when the schools districts are at an impasse.

On Monday, Sandhop said he was trying to at least hold preliminary diving at the high school. By Wednesday, things had changed.

District 5 still was unhappy with traveling to different venues and, according to Sandhop, no meeting has been scheduled to resolve the issue.

"Somebody's just got to make a decision about what's going to happen," he said.

With just about two weeks until the event, a decision needs to be made soon so that schools can organize travel schedules and possible hotel accommodations.

Although Moses Lake's new pool experienced some delays in opening, Sandhop still wanted to fight to hold the meet there. Swimmers have clocked faster times in Moses Lake's pool due to the gutters and the depth, according to Sandhop. This would give Moses Lake swimmers, as well as swimmers from other schools, the best opportunity to qualify for state as a wild card.

"We know the pool in Moses Lake is faster than the pool in Ellensburg," Sandhop said.

Moses Lake girls swimming held its first home meet Oct. 9 against Eisenhower, Davis and Sunnyside. The pool isn't quite at 100 percent completion as bleachers, an electronic timing system, second scoreboard and dehumidifier still need to be installed. The bleachers are scheduled to go in this week while the rest of the upgrades should be finished around Thanksgiving Sandhop said.

"My hope is that once we get a little bit of time ... We get our bleachers installed and we get our timing system and we know what we can do here then we'll be comfortable operating our own meet."