NCL to disband in football after 2019

This fall’s winners of the North Coast League football championships will be the last.

The league announced Aug. 20 that it will disband in football after the 2019 season, but remain intact for other sports.

The news was first reported by Cleveland.com.

“Football drives everything,” said Chuck Grimm, the executive secretary and assigner for the NCL in the Cleveland.com report. “When we talked to the principals, they’re thinking more high-level, big picture. They asked, ‘What’s the purpose? So how do we keep this league intact?’”

With that in mind, the leagues principals voted to disband in football after the 2019 season, but remain together in other sports, albeit with whittled-down league schedules.

The NCL has lost members in recent years. St. Thomas Aquinas, Trinity and Valley Christian already departed, and Padua has announced that the 201920 season will be its last.

Those departures mean that after this coming school year, the league will have 11 schools:

Akron Hoban, Beaumont, Benedictine, Cleveland Central Catholic, Gilmour, Lake Catholic, NDCL, St. Joseph Academy, VASJ, Walsh Jesuit and Warren JFK.

Benedictine is an all-boys school, while Beaumont and St. Joseph Academy have all-girl enrollments.

“It’s hard to say how this will work,” said Lake Catholic athletic director Sam Colacarro. “It’s weird because we’re not having a league for football. Everybody is on their own as an independent.”

Colacarro estimated many, if not most, of the schools will try to schedule each other in football as independent games.

The size difference in the remaining schools — Warren JFK, VASJ, Gilmour and Cleveland Central Catholic, for instance, are much smaller than Hoban, Walsh Jesuit, Lake and NDCL — makes it impossible to blend the remaining schools together for a football league.

Lake Catholic football coach Marty Gibbons said the absence of a league championship might not make a huge difference to the schools.

“As great as it is to compete for a league championship, competing for the postseason and state championships is a big deal, and that’s the goal. For us, (no league in football) won’t change our mindset at all.”

Colacarro said under the revamped league, schools will only play each other once in other sports such as basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball, etc. That will open up scheduling flexibility across the board.

“It will, maybe to a fault,” Colacarro said. “We’ll see. You’ll have 10 league games in those sports . ... I don’t know how it’s going to play out. I hope it works out for the best of the league.”