Northern 10 Athletic Conference set

For Carey and Riverdale, what’s old is new again.
Kind of.
The Blue Devils and Falcons will be joined together once again in a new conference as administrators from 10 schools met at Mohawk  Thursday and finalized plans to form the Northern 10 Athletic Conference.
Midland Athletic League members Carey, Mohawk and Seneca East will be joining North Central Conference schools Riverdale, Colonel Crawford, Crestline, Buckeye Central, Wynford, Bucyrus and Ridgedale of the Mid Ohio Athletic Conference in the new loop. Representatives from all 10 schools signed a commitment to form the new league which will begin play no later than the fall of 2014.
School officials for the Northern 10 will meet later this month to begin drafting a league constitution as well as finalizing the first set of conference schedules for the 2014-15 school year.
The new league will bring back together seven teams that competed together in the North Central Conference between 1963 and 1990.
Northern 10 members Riverdale, Carey, Mohawk, Buckeye Central, Colonel Crawford, Wynford and Ridgedale were members of the NCC when they conference had a major shake up in 1990.
That year, Carey and Mohawk left for the Midland Athletic League and Ridgedale and fellow NCC member schools River Valley, Elgin and Pleasant departed to compete in the Mid Ohio Athletic Conference in 1990.
The newly-formed league will leave big voids to fill in both the MAL and NCC when the schools in the Northern 10 Athletic Conference officially withdraw from their respective leagues, likely next week.
As far as the MAL schools are concerned, the school boards at Carey and Seneca East, one of the charter members of the MAL when it was formed in 1985, gave their administrators the go ahead to enter into agreements to join the new conference last month.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place Tuesday night when the Mohawk board of education voted 3-2 to allow the school to drop out of the MAL and join the new conference.
The impending withdrawal of Carey, Mohawk and Seneca East will leave the MAL with nine schools and a pronounced gap in the league’s football schedule.
North Baltimore, Hopewell-Loudon, Tiffin Calvert, Fremont St. Joseph and Lakota are the only schools that play football in the conference.
Fostoria St. Wendelin, Bettsville, New Riegel and Old Fort compete in other MAL-sponsored sports.
The MAL will most certainly be looking to add at least three schools to fill the gap in football.
Gibsonburg and Elmwood both applied to the MAL after the breakup of the Suburban Lakes League in 2009. But the vote on their entry into the league fell just one vote shy of the 10 affirmative votes needed for admission into the conference. But both have moved on to new homes with Elmwood competing in the Northern Buckeye Conference and Gibsonburg a member of the Toledo Area Athletic Conference.
The MAL is expected to discuss arrangements for possibly replacing the departing trio at it’s next league meeting on Thursday.
The North Central Conference, meanwhile, is in even a tougher spot as six of the conference’s 10 members will be withdrawing from the NCC to form the Northern 10.
Upper Sandusky, Galion, Ontario and Lucas will be the schools left behind in the NCC.
One couldn’t blame Upper Sandusky and Galion for feeling a little jilted.
Both left their longtime allegiance to the Northern Ohio League after being welcomed into the NCC by a unanimous vote in 2009.
Yet, just three months into the NCC’s two-division format established when Upper Sandusky and Galion were voted into the league, six of their fellow NCC members are picking up the ball and planning on playing elsewhere.
The next NCC meeting is scheduled to take place on Wednesday.
And it should be an interesting one.