district considers future of sports, activities

MOSES LAKE — In the event February’s school bond passes and Moses Lake builds a new high school, the school district will have to go through the long and complicated process of figuring out which leagues the new schools will belong to.

And according to Moses Lake High School Athletic Director Loren Sandhop, the district will have little say and almost no control over that process.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in the process,” Sandhop told the school board Thursday night. “Schools do not have their own destiny in their hands.”

Sandhop said the body that governs sports and other activities, the Western Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA), groups high schools by the size of their 9-11 grade student populations. The last survey of schools was done this year, and will be valid through 2020.

Moses Lake High School is currently a 4A school — the top classification for the state’s largest high school — with a surveyed population of 9-11 graders of just under 1,700. This puts Moses Lake in the Columbia Basin Big 9 league for competition.

According to Sandhop, Splitting the district into two high schools would bump both of them down to 2A size — schools with a 9-11 grade population between 461-971 students. That would make both schools a fit for the nearby CWAC, which includes high schools in nearby Ephrata, Quincy, and Othello.

However, Sandhop said there was no guarantee that the league would accept Moses Lake’s two new high schools. Moses Lake could “opt up” to 3A, but Sandhop said there are “no easy 3A leagues in Eastern Washington” and opting up would have to include all covered activities and sports.

To add to the complexity, school classifications are balanced right now to ensure each classification — 4A through 1B — is roughly equal in size, about 63 schools per group. Which means the cutoff numbers will likely change in 2020, when the WIAA does its next survey of high schools.

“The big schools are betting bigger and the small schools are getting smaller,” Sandhop said.

While the current WIAA survey is good for four years — 2016 to 2020 — most athletic directors plan for two years of competition. So any new high school would have to be up and running in an even year in order to have the best chance to secure league membership and making it onto a playing schedule.

There are high school that don’t belong to a WIAA league, Sandhop said, but they are completely at the mercy of the league schools around them.

The two high school could combine their efforts, and field a single team, but that would not change their classification, since the WIAA would consider them two separate schools, Sandhop said.

And the WIAA frequently amends and changes its rules and procedures, Sandhop said. The current four-year league classification period is something new. Previously, the WIAA surveys lasted only for two years.

“It’s not as simple as picking and choosing who we want to play with,” he added.