Article published October 14, 2009
Fremont Ross to join City League
By STEVE JUNGA
BLADE SPORTS WRITER
The City League’s Athletic Board of Control voted to accept Fremont Ross as a potential new member, but denied Findlay and Lima Senior high schools in a vote of the 10-member panel yesterday.
City League commissioner Ed Scrutchins confirmed that Ross was approved by an 8-2 vote, but declined to reveal the count of the ABC’s vote on the other two schools, acknowledging only that neither received the minimum seven votes required for approval.
“Each school was voted on individually,” Scrutchins said, “and the ABC saw fit to vote in Fremont Ross, and to not vote in Findlay and Lima Senior. Obviously, Ross brings in a strong athletic program in all sports, they have great fan support, and their athletic director [Art Bucci] has worked with many of our ADs in the past in a positive way. It should work out very well in the future.”
Scrutchins said that an overriding reason the ABC likely did not approve Findlay and Lima Senior was “travel.”
“It’s not so much the cost of travel,” Scrutchins said, “but the time aspect involved.”
All three schools are members of the six-school Greater Buckeye Conference, which will become defunct after the 2010-11 school year. Current GBC members Napoleon and Sandusky have been accepted as new members in the Northern Lakes League and Northern Ohio League, respectively. Marion Harding is the other GBC member.
Fremont Ross, Findlay and Lima Senior all applied for City League membership in recent months, essentially to avoid status as independents because their options for being admitted into any other league in Northwest Ohio are non-existent.
ABC members Dave Yenrick, the principal at Waite, and Rev. Ronald Olszewski, the president at St. Francis de Sales, researched the three schools in regard to potential membership in the CL, and had recently presented their findings to the rest of the board. The full ABC met to discuss the applicants yesterday, and then made their votes.
Scrutchins said Fremont Ross is not yet an official member of the City League, and the next step would be to gain approval from both the Fremont board of education and the Toledo Public Schools’ board of education.
Should Ross gain approval on both counts, it would become the CL’s 15th member in a group that includes two all-boys schools, St. John’s Jesuit and St. Francis de Sales, and two all-girls schools, Notre Dame and St. Ursula.
As a 13th school with boys sports, that would force Scrutchins to adopt a new scheduling format for football, one that would most likely require divisions of seven and six teams, unless the league were to lose a member.
There has been speculation in recent years that TPS may eventually close Libbey High School because of shrinking enrollment at the school combined with the overall funding situation within TPS.
Although speculation remains, Scrutchins acknowledged that TPS has taken no action to close Libbey and currently has no plan to do so.
“Once it’s approved,” Scrutchins said of the Ross membership, “we’ll take it back to the ABC as far as scheduling. We have a few ideas in place.”
Contact Steve Junga at:sjunga@theblade.comor 419-724-6461.
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