Are sports co-ops soluble? With the recent decision made by the school board, the co-ops with New Brighton High School and Quigley Catholic High School have been dissolved. This decision will be effective during the 2018-2019 school year, as well as the following year.

“If there is six classifications, in say football, they are going to divide all of the schools that have football. The first 100 are going to be 6A, the next 100 are going to be 5A, and so on.”  Freedom Athletic Director John Rosa said.

As of right now, almost all of the Freedom teams are classified as 2A.

“So how it works is, we get put into a classification. The larger school, so say for example with Quigley, which we are the larger school, we count all of our population, and half of the population of Quigley. So last year, Quigley had a male population of 40, so we would only count half, which is 20,” Rosa said. As of the next school year, not much is expected to change with the male population of Quigley Catholic, but the male population of Freedom High School is the bigger part of the problem.

“So if the cutoff for 2A football is 199 and we have 180 and Quigley has 50, we would count 25, and we would have 205. So without Quigley, we would be 2A, and with Quigley, we would be 3A,” Rosa continued.

Since the amount of males attending Quigley was 40 and the amount of male students at Freedom was 157, all of the boys sports that have a co-op with Quigley were based off a population of 177 for the classification range.

The decision comes after taking in consideration how the co-ops will affect which classification the different sports fall in. As of right now, many of the sports fall into the 2A category, but this would most likely change for some of the sports. If the co-ops had been kept, it would be most likely that sports like wrestling would be moved up to 3A classification, where there would be much more competition. This would be a problem because right now the wrestling team is one of the best teams in the 2A classification, but they would only be an average team at the 3A classification.

“We certainly want to compete in 2A for sports like football, we don’t want to go up to 3A in wrestling and different sports. We wanted to worry about Freedom students first, and then we would address the co-ops with Quigley and New Brighton at a later date. Nothing has gone bad with the co-ops, and they have both gone really well, especially with soccer, and I expect wrestling will go well too. It’s just one of those things where don’t want to move our school up to a higher classification just because the numbers change or something like that,” Rosa said.

However, some of the students that are involved with sports that already have co-ops this year that will dissolved next don’t agree with this decision.

“I disagree with the decision. Having people from other schools could help us, but without them, it won’t do us any good,” sophomore Myah Hrinko argued.

Though the co-ops with New Brighton and Quigley Catholic have been dissolved, there is still a way that players playing for Freedom right now can still play next year. There is a clause in the PIAA rules that allows players playing for a school when a co-op is dissolved are still allowed to play for that school the following two years. There is also good news for the future of the co-ops.

“We dissolved them because we want to be classified based accordingly, and we’ll revisit them based on the numbers released in later November or early December. That was the sole motivation of dissolving the co-ops and seeing where we fall next and possibly revisit them in the future,” Rosa stated.