Every two years, the Colorado High School Activities Association looks at its football classifications, mulls over the gains or losses in enrollments around the state and realigns the 42 teams in each classification as fair and reasonable as possible.
According to the changes already accepted by CHSAA after reviewing proposals from the state’s schools and football leagues, Durango High School’s football team is one of the programs that will see a major change if the vote goes through the Legislative Council as expected in a January vote.
The former 4A Pikes Peak Leaguers won’t be seeing Air Academy, Liberty, Pine Creek and Rampart anymore. Changes in enrollment numbers and criteria have led Durango into a completely different classification, schedule and league.
The DHS football team will now be in Class 3A’s Southern 1 League. Though the classification is different and the league will feature entirely different teams, the tough travel schedule will remain the same. In the Southern 1 League, DHS will be competing against Harrison and Sierra from Colorado Springs and Pueblo’s Pueblo Central, Pueblo County and Pueblo East.
“The reality of the situation is that no matter how you look at it, Durango is geographically difficult,” said Durango High School Athletic Director Dave Preszler in a phone interview with The Durango Herald. “It’s a small price to pay for living in a unique place like Durango and when it comes to high school football, we’re kind of the odd man out.”
While it would have made more sense for Durango to end up in the 3A Western Slope League with Battle Mountain, Eagle Valley, Glenwood Springs, Palisade, Rifle and Summit, it wasn’t in the cards as the six-team league couldn’t accommodate a newcomer. There was hope that Rifle might be sent to 2A and Durango could sneak into a better geographic situation, but it wasn’t to be this time around.
“Our only request was that the committee tried to make as much sense as possible geographically,” said Preszler. “They took a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each school’s situation and I think they did the best job that they could have. That’s all we were hoping for.”
CHSAA’s football’s numbers are different than the other sports since the creation of 6-man and 8-man teams started classes of their own. During the last cycle, population growth in many areas around the state shifted the criteria and some schools saw changes in classification though their particular student population may not have changed much.
Durango fell into this group of schools and has been impacted by the largest increase among all of the classifications. The maximum enrollment for teams in 3A football went up 200 students since 2014, from 1,049 to 1,249, and the DHS student population falls in between.
“Our numbers are down slightly, but it wasn’t a drastic change,” Preszler said. “Some schools around the state grew a lot and, in the end, that boosted the numbers so much that it sent some awfully good 4A teams down to 3A with us.”
One of 4A’s best conferences in 2015, the 4A Longs Peak League, lost two teams to the realignment as Longmont and Thompson Valley are headed down to 3A’s Northern League. Longmont is the back-to-back regular season Longs Peak League champion and will be a force to be reckoned with in the new 3A classification. The Trojans delivered a 42-6 win to the same Loveland team that ended Durango’s season with a 49-21 state playoff quarterfinal win. Both Longmont and Loveland lost in the playoffs to another 4A Longs Peak League team, Windsor, which went on to win the 4A state title.
As far as the Southern 1 League competition looks for next year’s Demons, the fact that they don’t have to play perennial powerhouse Pine Creek anymore is a win in itself. Instead, they’ll have to deal with the back-to-back 3A state champions from Pueblo East (13-1). All of the other teams in the new Class 3A Southern 1 League finished .500 or better except for Sierra (1-9). Durango (10-2), Harrison (7-4), Pueblo Central (5-5) and Pueblo County (6-5) will hope to dethrone Pueblo East next year.
jfries@durangoherald.com
