The first draft of the NCHSAA conference realignment has been announced, and it is clear that the realignment committee had to make some tough decisions.
Starting with the division, which is based on school size, Fuquay will be a 7A school, which is not the biggest like we are used to. The biggest is 8A and will include schools like Willow Spring, Apex and Rolesville.
Our new conference, currently named 7A Conference 1, includes Cleveland, Clayton, Garner, Holly Springs and South Garner.
These teams are not our final conference, as the athletic directors from all of these schools have an option to appeal the conference decisions. Although, during the last conference realignment, they did not make any changes to the first draft despite many appeals by FVHS’ own athletic director.
This is similar to what FVHS athletes and coaches wanted, but the lack of key rivalries like Willow Spring and Middle Creek, is concerning.
Willow was put in the 8A division, which makes sense due to their size, but there are 7/8A combined conferences. This means that the committee could have put us in their conference or vice versa.
Middle Creek was dropped to 6A, which generally means that we would have to pick either a 7/8A or 6/7A combined conference during the appeals process, and the cross-town rivalry with Willow is a lot more attractive.
If we don’t try to appeal the conference decisions, then Middle Creek and Willow would be out-of-conference games, similar to how Middle Creek and Holly Springs are now.
These conferences are for all sports across the school, so it is important for all athletes, coaches and fans, to talk about the realignment and its inaccuracy, as well as email the NCHSAA and our athletic director about appealing it soon.
For most sports, this new conference will be pretty easy, with our football team coming out looking for vengeance, our basketball team on the rise and our baseball team as good as ever.
Luckily, this is just the first draft, so there is time for there to be several appeals, and the final draft could be wildly different from this first draft.
The final draft will come out in the spring of 2025, and it has the ability to change sports at FVHS forever. You can find the full first draft here.
