We’ve got a new conference in the River Cities Alliance. So what happens next?
COMMENTARY
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - There’s a new athletic conference in West Michigan.
Seven schools officially split with the Ottawa-Kent Conference on Tuesday and formed the River Cities Alliance.
The seven schools - Allendale, Cedar Springs, Coopersville, Greenville, Kenowa Hills, Lowell and Sparta - have already created its own logo, website and even named a commissioner.
So now what?
The River Cities Alliance will begin at the start of the 2024-25 school year. So scheduling will be a scramble, both for RCA and the teams they played in the O-K Conference.
The biggest issue will be football. The RCA will have to break many of its contracts with O-K Conference schools and begin playing each other.
Here’s how the RCA’s nine-game football schedules will break down: Six conference games, two non-conference - possibly with O-K schools - and one crossover game with teams from the Capital Area Activities Conference (CAAC), according to a source.
Here’s what I’ve been told about those matchups for next fall with the CAAC:
Cedar Springs vs. Grand Ledge
Lowell vs. DeWitt
Coopersville vs. Holt
Allendale vs. Lansing Waverly
Greenville vs. Okemas
Sparta vs. Lansing Everett
Kenowa Hills vs. TBA
So the River Cities Alliance is already making an alliance with other schools.
The RCA hired Pete Bush as commissioner. He is very familiar with the new schools. According to an Mlive story, Bush served as athletic director at Cedar Springs, superintendent at Sparta, principal at Coopersville and varsity baseball and basketball coach at Lowell.
Sounds like the perfect guy for the job.
Will O-K Conference schools blackball the seven RCA? That’s highly unlikely.
Athletic directors usually have strong working relationships with each other. They won’t turn their noses up at all seven schools. In fact, I mentioned before that Hastings was blackballed when it left the O-K Conference. But that was not the case at all. Hastings AD Mike Goggins reached out and said that his school has a great relationship with O-K schools.
The O-K Conference athletic directors that I’ve spoken to in the past two weeks aren’t thrilled about how this will shake up the sports schedules and force a realignment, but they seemed to understand why the RCA schools left.
The O-K Conference had a meeting on Tuesday to officially announce its vote on if they would approve the seven schools to walk away. The vote was 35-13 against the move, according to a Fox17 story. But it was just a formality. The RCA schools were leaving anyway.
So the next order of business at the meeting was to form another realignment committee and go back to the drawing board. I took a stab at what a new O-K Conference could look like in a story two weeks ago.
They will have to make some big changes regardless.
The RCA is hoping to have at least one more school join its league before next fall and possibly 14 total teams by the 2025-26 school year. Although that seems unrealistic.
Some people have jokingly compared the new league to the LIV Tour, which is the new golf tour formed to lure top PGA Tour players. Let’s hope things don’t get that contentious.
The best thing for both sides is to play nice. If this forms a wedge between the two sides, it would only hurt the student-athletes.
