Watertown-Mayer will be changing conferences
March 9, 2010 by Aaron Schultz
Filed under Mayer, Sports
WATERTOWN, MN – Last night (Monday) at the Watertown-Mayer School Board meeting, the board voted 6-1 to accepted the invitation from the Minnesota River Conference.
The Royals will play one final season in the Wright County Conference, and then will begin play in their new conference in 2011-12.
Other members of the Minnesota River Conference include Mayer Lutheran, Norwood Young America, Holy Family, Sibley East, Jordan, Belle Plaine, LeSueur-Henderson, and Montgomery-Lonsdale.
Would you mind adding a little more information for those of us who don’t know anything about these conferences? Are they based on school size? Do they reflect the quality of the athletic program? Some context would be very much appreciated.
Aaron said that schools of similar size get together and decide. As far as quality, this is not certain. He will write a larger article for Monday’s paper that will explain further.
I am not a bit surprised to hear this. My husband and I thought that when Hutchinson joined the Wright Co Conference that Watertown Mayer would end up leaving. They are the smallest school now in the conference. Even though they are highly competitive in many of the sports…football is not one of them. They have allowed too many larger schools into the conference. It will be harder and harder to be competitive with schools that have more than double the student body than the smaller schools in the conference have. The larger schools should have formed their own conference and then left the schools that are closer in size to be together. Sorry to see WTM leave. They had some awesome athletes that I have enjoyed watching over the years.
I would have liked to see the biggest schools in the WCC: Orono, Waconia, Hutchinson and Mound-Westonka start a new conference with some other smaller west metro teams. Then the remaining schools: Litchfield, Glencoe-Silver Lake, Annandale, Dassel-Cokato, Watertown-Mayer and Delano to join forces with say, Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City, Maple Lake, Kimball, or Howard Lake-Waverly-Winsted. Then the teams would not have to travel as far and be with schools closer in size.