“Use your head for something besides a hat rack!”
If I heard that phrase once, I heard it 100 times throughout my lifetime. It’s what my father usually said to me after I had made a mistake that could have been easily avoided if I had only thought before I had done such an action.
Now it’s my turn to say it to somebody: to the 19 people who serve on the board of directors for the Arkansas Activities Association. It was these 19 people — all of whom serve as school superintendents, assistant superintendents or associate superintendents at their respective schools — who approved the conference alignments for the 2016-18 reclassification cycle during their summer workshop last week.
How much time did they actually spend on the Class 3A football alignments before they decided those were good enough to use? I ask this because, unless somebody can come up with an appeal that will appease their minds, Elkins and Greenland better get ready for even more trips through the long and winding roads.
The two Washington County schools knew ahead of time they would lose West Fork, which moves to Class 4A status next year. However, the new conference alignments caused them to also lose Cedarville — one of their closer trips in the current cycle — and in their place are Clinton and Melbourne, a school they had played as a conference opponent in the 2012-14 alignment, along with trips to Yellville-Summit, Mountain View and Marshall.
Greenland just inherited one of the longest trips a Class 3A school must make to play a football game when it makes the 175-mile trek to Melbourne — a journey that will take more than 3.5 hours in a bus through northern Arkansas in the best conditions, according to Google maps. Only Fouke, located in the southwest corner of the state, has longer trips when it has to go 184 miles to McGehee and 178 miles to Lake Village, both of which are in southeastern Arkansas.
What is even more mind-boggling is the fact when Greenland has to drive to Clinton (or vice versa), the shortest trip by means of time uses Interstate 40 and goes through Lamar and Atkins, two schools in the 3A-4 Conference. In fact, Greenland is closer to EVERY 3A-4 school (as well as 3A-2 member Mayflower and 3A-5 school Jessieville) than it is to Melbourne, which is actually closer to about 20 different 3A schools throughout central and eastern Arkansas (including every one in two different conferences).
Greenland football coach Lee Larkan said his team would have to leave school around 12:30 p.m. on the day his team would have to play a game at Melbourne, and who knows what time the Pirates would return that night? What was even worse, according to Larkan, was how would junior high teams address this situation when their games are played on Thursday nights with school in session the next day.
What could even more puzzling than that? The fact McGehee superintendent Thomas Gathen — whose school has had to endure those long trips to Fouke and Genoa Central — is a member of the AAA board of directors and actually helped such a thing be passed.
There has to be a better way than this. It’s time for the AAA board of directors to head back to their little workshop space, use their heads for something besides hat racks and come up with a much better solution.
Henry Apple can be reached at happle@nwadg.com or on Twitter @NWAHenry.