Alaska will have one less high school football team next season when Juneau's two programs combine forces to become a single team.
The Alaska School Activities Association board of directors on Thursday approved a proposal from the Juneau School District that will merge the football programs from Juneau-Douglas and Thunder Mountain high schools.
The team will be based at Juneau-Douglas and will be called the Crimson Bears, according to Kevin Hamrick, the head coach last season at Juneau-Douglas.
"I think most people are excited because neither program has been able to field a JV team since the breakup, and that's the No. l thing, letting our young kids play some JV," Hamrick said. "That is my goal."
The breakup Hamrick refers to is the opening of Thunder Mountain High School in the fall of 2009, which gave Juneau two high schools and reduced enrollment at Juneau-Douglas.
The football co-op won't be the first between the two schools. A year ago, Thunder Mountain and Juneau-Douglas combined their wrestling, tennis and debate/drama programs.
In its letter to ASAA requesting permission to combine the two football programs, the Juneau School District said the merger will address safety and financial concerns.
Both programs are in debt, according to the district — $118,000 for Thunder Mountain and $33,000 for Juneau-Douglas.
"It's just not been a sustainable situation to have high school football teams at both high schools," Kristin Bartlett, the Juneau district's chief of staff, said in an interview Wednesday.
When Thunder Mountain opened, the pool of players was divided between the two schools and neither had enough players or money to field JV teams, Bartlett said. And that, she said, "puts underclassmen on the line with upperclassmen and it doesn't allow for the development of players."
Bartlett said both programs owe money to the school district, which pays for travel expenses but is reimbursed for them by booster clubs. And those travel expenses are steep — the Juneau teams have to fly to most of their road games, and they have to help pay travel expenses for visiting teams.
The ASAA board also OK'd the Juneau district's request to merge the two schools' football cheer squads. Many other details of the merger, including what the coaching staff will look like, haven't been determined, Hamrick said.
Billy Strickland, the executive director of ASAA, said the team will play in Division I with the rest of Alaska's biggest schools. For the last several years, Juneau and Thunder Mountain have played at the Division II level for medium-sized teams.
The change in Juneau comes at the same time North Pole High is choosing to move up from Division II to Division I. The result leaves Ketchikan as the lone survivor of the Division II Southeast Conference, which previously consisted of Ketchikan, North Pole and the two Juneau schools.
"We're going to have to relook at those divisions," Strickland said.
Strickland said ASAA formed a 20-member committee in September to consider possible reclassifications for basketball and volleyball. Now that committee will tackle football, too.
One possible outcome, Strickland said, is changing the enrollment requirement for Division I football to 1,000 students, up from the current 900.
That could push the Fairbanks schools, including North Pole, into Division II and leave Division I with 10 teams — seven teams from Anchorage (Bartlett, Chugiak, Dimond, East, Service, South, West), Wasilla, Colony and Juneau.
Strickland speculated that if that happens, four teams would advance to the Division I playoffs instead of eight.
"I would say if we got to 10 schools, they'd play everybody one time, eliminate the quarterfinal (playoff round) and the top four would advance," he said. "That's just me speculating."
Juneau and Thunder Mountain are Alaska's first schools to request and be granted approval to form a football co-op, Strickland said. A number of co-ops exist in basketball, he said.
The move will leave Alaska with 29 high school football teams.
Here's the current alignment for football:
Division I
Cook Inlet Conference
Bartlett
Dimond
East
Service
South
West
Railbelt Conference
Chugiak
Colony
Lathrop
Wasilla
West Valley
Division II
Northern Lights Conference
Eagle River
Kenai
Kodiak
Palmer
Soldotna
Southeast Conference
Juneau-Douglas
Ketchikan
North Pole
Thunder Mountain
Division III
Aurora Conference
Barrow
Eielson
Houston
Monroe
Valdez
Peninsula Conference
Homer
Nikiski
Redington
Seward
Voznesenka
ADN reporter Tegan Hanlon contributed to this report.