Suggestions for the new O-K Conference realignment
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Now that it is official that at least seven schools are leaving the Ottawa-Kent Conference, there will have to be a major overhaul in realigning the schools.
I realize many of you will think i’m crazy, but here are my suggestions. These are almost entirely based on geography and not just about enrollment. This way it would foster local rivalries and lessen travel time.
The biggest changes would be creating a private school division and having Belding, Hopkins and Middleville leave the O-K Conference to find other homes. Geographically, they are the farthest outlying schools. Belding, which is in Ionia County, already applied to join the Central State Activities Association, but were denied. Hopkins is in Allegan County and Middleville is in Barry County.
The new River City Alliance Conference will see seven schools leave the O-K Conference, forcing this realignment: Allendale, Cedar Springs, Coopersville, Greenville, Kenowa Hills, Lowell and Sparta.
The O-K Conference schools will meet on Oct. 24 to vote on whether they will approve the seven schools to leave before the two-year mandatory period. The River City Alliance schools have already made up their minds that they will leave regardless. So that means the remaining schools will need to discuss realignment. They had already voted to realign heading into the 2024-25 school year.
O-K RED: The biggest changes would be adding Byron Center and West Ottawa and Grand Haven would leave to join a new O-K Blue for geographic reasons.
O-K WHITE: Not a huge change here. But adding all three Forest Hills schools would be the big change. Other than Wayland, all these schools are relatively close.
O-K BLUE: This conference would have the biggest changes. It would add the three Muskegon schools, West Ottawa and Grand Haven. To make it six schools, I’m suggesting adding Whitehall to the mix, if they were interested. They are all relatively close on the Lakeshore.
O-K GOLD: The City League went away years ago. But it was successful because they were all in Grand Rapids. This would be the same idea. Have basically all Wyoming and Grand Rapids schools in the same conference along with Comstock Park to make it an even six schools.
O-K GREEN: The idea, again, is to put all the schools in the same geographic region together. Most of these schools have already been in the same conferences.
O-K CHRISTIAN: Let’s be honest, this one needed to be done years ago. All the large private schools have a lot of similarities sports-wise and the public schools have complained about their dominance on the court/field for decades. The only thing that isn’t ideal is that Holland Christian would be a long drive for most teams.
O-K SILVER: This would be a major overhaul. The idea is to put the smallest schools, who have the fewest sports, all in one division. Only one of these schools has football, so that would be Ideal, too. If the teams that are in the Alliance League had no interest in this idea, then just disband the O-K Silver altogether and let all the schools join the Alliance. Five of these schools used to be in the old River Valley Conference. So there’s still some old rivalries.
