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Williams will be hitting the road again this coming fall<br>

It’s back to the long road trips for Williams High School.

Thanks to decisions by Mogollon and Orme to drop back down into Class 1A, Williams was placed in a conference with the “reservation schools” during this fall’s Arizona Interscholastic Association meetings on realignment.

Beginning with the 2003-04 school year, Williams will be in a region with Many Farms, Sanders Valley, Chinle Rough Rock and Teec Nos Pos Red Mesa. St. Johns and Mayer remain with Williams to round out the new region.

“I don’t think anybody’s excited about the travel again, including myself,” WHS athletic director Rick Shipley said. “We’ve been in that league before. It just adds a lot of travel time and time away from school.”

Williams currently plays in a 2A North Conference split into the Canyon and Four Corners regions. But there are no requirements for the Canyon teams to play all the Four Corners teams. In football, for example, all the Canyon teams played just one other school from the opposite region.

Since Mogollon and Orme did not petition to play in Class 2A over the next two-year cycle and Pinon jumped up to 3A, that left only seven schools in the north. Shipley said it did not make sense to split those seven teams into two separate regions.

“There’s no other league for us to be in,” Shipley said. “The state puts us in the league. Travel is always something the AIA takes into consideration. In this western side of the state, we’re isolated. Mayer is the closest and they’re two hours away. The second closest would be to Valley or the Phoenix schools.”

The possibility of placing Williams in a league with Phoenix schools is always remote. Shipley said they have 10 schools within a 30-mile radius in the Valley.

“It wouldn’t make sense for us to go to Phoenix and put a Phoenix school in the ‘reservation’ league,” he said.

Williams played in a league with those same reservation schools during back-to-back two-year cycles from 1995-98. When news came of a new conference without the long road trips, all coaches were relieved. But the school district now might want to think about an extra tune-up for the buses.

Teec Nos Pos, home to Red Mesa, appears to be the longest road trip. The community is located in the northeast corner of the Navajo reservation just a few miles from Four Corners. Many Farms and Chinle, home to Rough Rock, are both located on Highway 191 in the Canyon de Chelly National Monument area.

Sanders, where the Valley Pirates play, is located on I-40 about 20 minutes west of the New Mexico border.

The other two teams in the region, St. Johns and Mayer, have been in the current league with Williams over the past two years. St. Johns is a long trip, located near the New Mexico border about an hour south of Sanders. Mayer is the closest to Williams, located east of the Prescott Valley area.

The travel time will be most noticeable when Williams must play games that do not fall on a Friday or Saturday. Shipley said those Friday-Saturday slots are usually already filled up with games in the various sports and those Tuesday games are necessary.

“We already use the Fridays and Saturdays that we have; it’s not like we can make others up,” Shipley said.

“Some schools don’t like to play on Friday or Saturday. For instance, Rough Rock is a boarding school on a four-day week. So on Thursday, they shut their school down.”

Rough Rock prefers to play Monday through Thursday because of financial reasons. Students and employees, such as those bus drivers, are sent home for their three-day weekend.

The competition in the new conference will vary by sport. In general, the reservation schools have always been strong in sports like cross country and basketball, but have struggled in football. When the Vikings played in the 2A North with those schools (1995-98), Williams compiled a 12-0 record against Red Mesa, Valley and Many Farms with most of those being shutouts and 42-point mercy rule games. Rough Rock did not play football and Hopi was Class 2A at the time. Sedona was also in the league.

“In football, we’ve had success with some of those schools, but they’re getting better. We won it every year and we played Sedona in everything those years, too,” Shipley said. “St. Johns and Mayer will still be in the league and we lost to both of those schools this year.”

The Vikings also had success in the old league in softball and baseball and would be regulars at the state playoffs each year.

Basketball was a different story, however. That sport is very big on the reservation and their teams would perform competitively on the state playoff level.

Volleyball is another competitive sport among those schools and they dominate in cross country. The Vikings just started their cross-country program a few years ago and will be going up against some of the best in the state next year.

In golf, Williams will continue to play in a region made up of schools in various classes.


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