The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Benefits for co-op teams are more than just football
Cooperation lets high school students like Alexander Hedhili play football in Connecticut.
And if Hedhili chose to think about that on the way home from practice, he’d have plenty of time in the car.
“An hour, Kent to Winsted,” said Hedhili, a senior at Housatonic Regional who plays for the Gilbert/Northwestern/Housatonic co-op that draws from a dozentown geographical swath of northwestern Connecticut.
“On a school day I ride with a friend from Housatonic to Gilbert. He lives in Sharon, so he’ll drop me off at Sharon Center School.”
Picked up from there, the ride home is only about 25 minutes.
“I don’t get home till 8 at night,” Hedhili said.
It’s got to be worth it, though, right? “I’ll find out if it’s worth it,” he said.
Cooperative teams, or co-ops, bring separate schools together with the CIAC’s approval when they don’t have enough players on their own to field a team. There are 20 football co-ops this season out of 138 programs.
Whatever logistical headaches may come, they’re balanced by the opportunities they provide and the relationships they build, administrators and coaches said this week.
“The co-op concept as a whole is one of the greatest things the CIAC ever supported,” said Ian Neviaser, superintendent of Region 18, which provides the second half of one of the state’s longest running co-ops, Valley Regional/Old Lyme. “It has allowed students at a smaller schools like ourselves to compete in sports we wouldn’t be able to offer.”
And it helps keep them home, too, he said; some might have chased the opportunity at a private school instead.
Old Lyme is involved in several co-ops in various sports, including a new one with Westbrook in the state’s only field hockey pair-up.
“Co-ops, in an age of tight budgets, allow hundreds of kids an opportunity to play sports that they might not otherwise have,” East Hampton principal Eric Verner said. His school teams with Hale-Ray and host Coginchaug in football, is part of a co-op with East Haven in hockey and has a team-of-one swimmer who competes with Mercy. They host a softball co-op with Portland.
In football, a school can’t co-op if it has 32 players, or 25 in the sophomore to senior classes. Teams joining together have to be from the same geographic area. Their school boards each have to approve the agreement.
Co-ops are rarer in the more densely populated southwest of the state. Though there have been others in the past, the only current co-ops involving teams in the FCIAC, SWC, NVL or SCC are Abbott Tech/Immaculate and the new Bullard-Havens/Kolbe Cathedral; each includes a Catholic school, the smallest two schools in boys enrollment from those three conferences.
The CIAC reported 8,863 total football players in 2019, down 18% from a peak of 10,815 a decade earlier.
But 144 programs offered some level of football. That number was 120 as recently as the year 2000. There are 16 wholly new programs since 2002, and six of those are co-ops, though some of the independents spent time in a co-op and at least one co-op is made up of programs
once independent.
Hartford Public coach and former committee member Harry Bellucci on GameTimeCT’s football podcast, The Meat Grinder, mentioned venerable programs like Derby — once in a short-lived co-op with O’Brien Tech — struggling for numbers, and they were far from the only ones this fall.
“You’re going to see way more (cooperation) now,” Bellucci said. “That’s going to continue to happen as rosters dwindle.”
There were 10 co-ops listed in the 2002 CIAC tournament packet. Of those, only one is intact and identical today, Old Saybrook/Westbrook, which goes back over a decade further, Old Saybrook athletic director and alumnus Brendan Saunders said.
But only one of those 10 co-ops has seen both schools become their own independent program, East Catholic/Cheney Tech. Two host schools have become independent with their former cohorts now in other co-ops.
“We hope co-ops grow. The idea isn’t to be in a coop the rest of their life,” CIAC associate executive director Gregg Simon said. “We want them to establish co-ops and show other students what a great experience they’re having. As more and more come out, teams break apart and it leads to growth in the sport.”
Aside from OSW, only two other co-ops have had their current lineup for more than seven years: Valley Regional/Old Lyme since 2006 and Quinebaug Valley (Putnam, Tourtellotte and Ellis Tech) since 2010.
Stafford/East Windsor/ Somers coach Brian Mazzone calls his team “as true a co-op as you can get,” comparing his to programs like Granby/Canton, which merged two pre-existing teams, and SMSA, which absorbed a Bulkeley team that goes back to 1926.
“You take Somers and East Windsor, they could never field a team,” Mazzone said. “Somers tried but never got more than 20 kids.”
This year’s team has 27 Stafford players, 10 from East Windsor and 12 from Somers.
Neviaser said this year’s team includes around 25 Old Lyme players out of about 60, and that’s a higher number than usual. HaleRay principal Chris Eckert, who was coach at Cromwell when Portland joined up in a co-op, figured Coginchaug provided about 20 players, with seven from his school and eight or nine from East Hampton, fairly typical, though Hale-Ray had five seniors this year.
The numbers fluctuate, and teams do grow out of co-ops; Gilbert/Northwestern/Housatonic coach Scott Salius said Northwestern came close about a decade ago, but then enrollment
decreased.
Gilbert/Northwestern was traditionally Northwestern-heavy, and this year’s team is no different, with 23 from that school and a dozen roughly evenly divided from the others.
Adding Housatonic to the Gilbert/Northwestern co-op doubled the number of towns it represents.
“On the back of our Tshirts it says ‘12 towns, one team,’ Salius said; though some refer to them as the Yellowjackets, Gilbert’s nickname, Salius said they don’t use that themselves to promote unity.
Those dozen towns are small enough that the three schools’ combined boys enrollment is on par with Class L schools’ like Wilton, Middletown or Farmington. The program is in Class M because the CIAC classifies co-ops under a formula that accounts for the smaller schools’ participation ratio on the team.
Though Gilbert and Northwestern are a short city-bus ride apart, adding Housatonic sometimes means waiting for those players to arrive, like Hedhili, who has the longest ride.
Finances are up to individual co-ops, though, as Simon emphasized, the CIAC has a rule against forming a co-op for financial reasons.
There’s often a lump sum per player that goes to the school that’s ultimately paying for coaches, equipment and other expenses. Some schools pay the salary of an assistant coach or two. Neviaser said Region 18 pays for a bus to get its players to Valley Regional.
Hale-Ray has a little earlier dismissal than the other schools, Eckert said, so a bus goes from there to East Hampton to pick up those players and heads to Coginchaug. Parents arrange car pools for games with older kids driving to Coginchaug, Verner said.
Mazzone said it’s sometimes tough to get East Windsor students to Stafford for a JV game on Saturday, so in the past some of them slept over in Stafford on Fridays.
It’s not always smooth. On Tuesday, Somers students sprang on Mazzone that they had a half day on Wednesday. “‘Didn’t you know we had a half day?’ I said I barely know my own children’s schedules,” Mazzone said.
The students caught rides back to school to get picked up for practice.
Coaches may pay a visit to middle schools to try to encourage eighth graders to try out the next year, or to stay in the public-school system rather than going to a prep school.
“I’m always going to three middle schools and three high schools,” Mazzone said. “A couple of years at East Windsor it was literally me and one kid.”