By Gene Schallenberg
As today’s date has neared the past couple of weeks, New Waverly football head coach Ken Craig has been anxious to see what is in store for his team.
The University Interscholastic League will announce the new reclassification and realignment for the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years this morning at 9. The hour-long program will air on Fox Sports Houston at 9 a.m. and will also be streamed online at FoxSportsHouston.com.
“It’s a little bit like Christmas for us coaches,” Craig said before New Waverly’s boys and girls basketball games against Buffalo on Jan. 22. “You try to get ideas of what people think is going to happen. You open the box and see what Santa Claus brought you.
“Then of course, there’s a frenzy afterward as you try to get your nondistrict schedule down to see who’s interested in playing you.
“It’ll be interesting to see where you end up.”
There will be a different wrinkle in the next two years for Class 2A, which is where Craig expects the Bulldogs to stay.
Starting this fall, Class 2A schools with the largest enrollment will be predetermined to be Division I or large schools and compete in districts with only Division I teams. The same would be true with the smaller half of Class 2A. In both divisions, the top two teams in each district will advance to the playoffs.
In the past, the football teams that had the largest enrollment of playoff-bound teams from its respective districts were placed into the Division I bracket. This created scenarios where Division II teams had larger enrollment numbers than several Division I teams.
“I think more than anything, it levels the playing field,” said Craig, who is also the school’s athletic director. “Sometimes we would face teams in the playoffs who had 150 more kids at their disposal. They would have twice the number of coaches and kids than we would have. They could almost two-platoon, while we wouldn’t have the resources to do that.”
According to the projection on HuddleUpTexas.com, teams like White Oak, Ponder, Woodville and Daingerfield, which have knocked Bulldogs teams out of the playoffs the past two years, would be designated into Division I.
In that projection, New Waverly will be in District 12-2A with Anderson-Shiro, Corrigan-Camden, Deweyville, Groveton and Hemphill.
Craig has seen various other projections, but admitted that it’s all just a guessing game.
“We’ve seen some projections where we may go a little bit east, which would have schools like Deweyville and Hemphill,” Craig said. “We’ve also seen others that would have us with Garrison or Warren or San Augustine, although I think they may be moving down to (Class) 1A.
“We can’t go too much south, because there are a lot of larger schools in the Houston area.”
Regardless of where the Bulldogs end up, Craig is confident that his team, which has won two straight outright district championships, will compete for a third.
“We’re going to have another strong team and we’ll be in the mix for a district championship whatever district we’re in,” Craig added. “Our offensive line has been working hard in the weight room, getting bigger and stronger. We’re also going to have quality skill guys as good or better than what we had this past year.”
