WIAA Ruins SE Wisconsin High School Sports

Well, it's been real.  I'm not a doomsday person when it comes to sports. Sure, I can overreact but never like 'This is the end of the world,'  Deb Hauser, WIAA Director, is guaranteeing Southeastern Wisconsin high school sports will cease to exist as a competitive force minus three to five schools. Many schools including my alama mater, Wauwatosa West, will be forced to combined athletic programs and possibly schools to make themselves competitive.

The conference outlook is on your right, and it's clearly loaded in all four conferences. When in sports, would four conferences ever make sense? Imagine college football doing that, there would be great matchups, but there's no real consistency given teams will not play each other as often as they did in their former conferences.

I get some schools like Tosa East, Grafton and others are running away from their conferences creating a problem as the top heavy schools run things and these smaller, less successful, schools want nothing to do with their former conference. For East and Grafton among others, this isn't really good news either and it creates a new strategy.

Wauwatosa where I live now and grew up will be one school within the next five years. Many people will hate it as there's an East-West rivalry, and it's more with people reliving their glory days versus the players themselves on the court or field. What's sad is this will limit kids the opportunity to play athletic sports in school. Tryouts for the Wauwatosa team will be loaded with talent and bench players who make East or West will not make it to the second cut. That'll be the new era of sports, not only in Tosa, but also New Berlin, West Allis and others.

Hauser's tone deaf plan only helps the fat cats in Southeastern Wisconsin and since they have the money, it makes sense the WIAA would pander to them versus trying to come up with a plan that helps everyone versus a small one percent. (Jesus, I sound like a Bernie supporter..)

Enjoy the Woodland Conference and Tosa East-Tosa West rivalry while you can.

Charlie.