Change coming soon to state’s football landscape

Fans who like change need to wait only one more year before the Arkansas Activities Association reshuffles the deck in a process called reclassification.

Teams can move up or down every two years in class based on enrollment. There’ll be major changes beginning in 2020 at a handful of area schools, including Van Buren, Pea Ridge, Lincoln, and the two Fort Smith schools — Northside and Southside — which will be separated and assigned to different conferences in Class 7A for football and Class 6A for other sports.

Lincoln will drop down to Class 3A in 2020 and 2021 after posting one of its best records in Class 4A. The Wolves finished 8-3 last season and beat 4A-1 powerhouse Prairie Grove for the first time in nearly 25 years.

Lincoln coach Don Harrison anticipates a strong finish in Class 4A this season before joining teams in the 3A-1 Conference in 2020.

“We know we’re a 3A team, the AAA has already told us,” Harrison said. “But we’re not focusing on that. We’re focused on doing our job in 4A. We have a saying around here that we focus on our specifics and not our circumstances.”

Van Buren will receive a fighting chance in Class 6A beginning in 2020 after being kicked around for years while trying to compete as the smallest school in terms of enrollment in Class 7A. Van Buren has won more than four games only once in the past decade, and the Pointers failed to win any games in 2017.

Van Buren hopes to build some momentum for the move in the 7A-West this season under Crosby Tuck, who was promoted to head coach of the Pointers after Casey Dick was hired at Fayetteville.

“This is what we wanted,” Van Buren athletic director Randy Lloyd said about the move for the 2020-2022 cycle. “As much as we love working with the 7A-West football coaches and going up to Northwest Arkansas and playing games, this is for our kids. They are our No. 1 priority.”

Pea Ridge will face new challenges beginning in 2020 after emerging as a top football program in Class 4A. The Blackhawks, who won 13 games in 2016 and 12 games in 2017, will join Farmington in the 5A-West Conference and compete against teams such as Harrison, Morrilton and Alma.

“With the growth in our school system, we anticipated the move to Class 5A in football,” Pea Ridge athletic director Kevin Ramey said. “With the new conference comes new challenges, as well

as opportunities. The 5A Conference is spread out quite a bit further than what we are accustomed to, so travel and loss of class time is a concern for our student-athletes and community. We will miss competing against teams in the 4A-1 as we have done for so many years. We are looking forward to the new conference, and competing against teams and schools we have not seen before.”

Nowhere will the impact of reclassification be felt more than in Fort Smith, where Northside and Southside will play in different conferences for the first time since 1980 when Northside was a Class AAAAA school and Southside was a member of the AAAAWest Conference.

The AAA handbook is rigid with a rule that requires 7A football and Class 6A basketball schools to have eight teams in each conference. That means two schools located three miles apart will head in different directions with Southside rejoining the 7A-West Conference and Northside remaining in the 7A-Central.

That means the state’s best high school football rivalry and long described as the “Battle of Rogers Avenue” will lose some of its impact as a nonconference game.

That means the game between Northside and Southside on Nov. 8 at Southside will signify another chapter in a sports story that changes every two years.

That’ll be a sad day, for sure, regardless of who wins. Rick Fires can be reached at rfires@ nwadg.com or on Twitter @NWARick.