Naselle school board votes to go Class 1B

It might be a while before the KM trophy comes out of its case again. The Naselle-Grays River Valley School District has decided to accept their new Washington Inter-scholastic Activities Association classification of 1B, which means a switch to eight-man football in the fall.

The WIAA is finishing up the process of reclassifying schools throughout the state this year, and brackets will be finalized sometime in early 2014 for the 2104-2015 school year.

Right now, the 397 schools in the state have been broken up into six brackets based on enrollment. The top four brackets are made up of 66 teams and the bottom two, the 2B and 1B schools each have 63. According to Russ Hickman, the athletic director for the Naselle schools, the 1B bracket enrollment counts vary from eight to 79.

Recent errors in the WIAA formula initially concluded that Naselle had an enrollment of 175, but just this week the district was informed that their actual count was 73, Hickman said, placing them near the upper end of the 1B bracket.

The district could opt up to 2B, but have decided not to do so.

According to Hickman, there are a lot of questions about the stability of the Pacific League, and that means he is currently in the dark about what their schedule may look like. Naselle may yet decide to join a league if there are any available to them or they may decide to go independent like many teams before them.

The high school teams have a few options, but the middle school teams seem to have even less.

“We still have to decide what to do with middle school sports, Hickman said. “But they’ll probably be playing Oregon schools.”

Fans of the Mule-Comet rivalry and KM Trophy games will have to content themselves with basketball for the time being. At least until the day Wahkiakum and Naselle return to the same classification and join each other on the field to lay claim to the trophy.