EL looks to add second league affiliation

EAST LIVERPOOL - The Potters are looking for a permanent home.

After spending the past two seasons in the Metro Athletic Conference (MAC), East Liverpool now returns full-time to the OVAC.

While the move may have lessened the concern over several issues that plagued the Potters, such as travel time and financial constraints, it also creates some new ones. Those problems have East Liverpool Athletic Director Bob Shansky and head football coach Pat McNicol in search of a league to join in the near future.

The OVAC is a loosely-based conference that has no mandatory scheduling rules for its schools, rather only requiring that a school must play a majority of its games against OVAC opponents. With no conference games guaranteed by the league, school officials must compile their schedule from scratch.

Enter the athletic director.

Shansky, who was named to the position in August of last year, has taken on the brunt of the workload in preparing East Liverpool's 2008 slate of opponents.

Fifty-seven different schools were contacted, from Cleveland to Wheeling, before the schedule was complete.

"It takes an awful lot of time," Shansky noted. "You've got to call each school and you get a lot of no's. You have to keep track of who you call so you don't call them again. That's a headache."

This year's schedule has the

Potters facing some familiar foes, some new ones, and some they haven't seen in a while.

No East Liverpool season seems complete without Beaver Local, Steubenville and Salem, which are all once again slated to take on the Potters. Oak Glen (2005), Cleveland Heights (2004), Wheeling Park (2003) and Youngstown Chaney (1995) all return to East Liverpool's schedule after recent absences. New to the fray is Maple Heights, Harrison Central, Linsly and John Marshall.

But without conference games automatically locked in, the process of finding opponents will start all over again next year if the Potters can't find a league to join.

At this point, both Shansky and McNicol have their eyes on the Buckeye 8 Conference, which includes Bellaire, Buckeye Local, Edison, Harrison Central, Indian Creek, Martins Ferry, St. Clairsville and Union Local.

"A good league for us in the future would be the Buckeye 8," McNicol said. "There are a lot of old names in there that we used to play. I've talked to a couple of coaches about it. We just have to get the right people on the phone to make it happen."

Shansky also likes the idea of East Liverpool joining the Buckeye 8, but isn't entirely optimistic of that happening at this point.

"We're trying real hard," he said. "We'd like to get into a conference with seven teams so we could keep Beaver Local, Salem and Oak Glen on the schedule. That would be a perfect fit, but it's hard to find. Ideally, the Buckeye 8 would be nice, but according to my sources, there is no interest in expanding."

East Liverpool might have joined the Buckeye 8 Conference, which is entering its third full year of existence, when it was created, but it was committed to the MAC at that time. According to Shansky, it was a case of the Potters being "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

McNicol believes East Liverpool's troubles with the MAC mostly revolved around numbers.

"The tough part is when you're shrinking and you're schedule lags behind," he said. "That's a bad thing. If your growing and your schedule lags behind, it's a good thing. I wish we could've stayed (in the MAC) and competed, but we continued to get smaller."

For Shansky, travel time and the lack of true rivalries were the main concerns.

"As a coach, the travel time was difficult," he said. "It always seems further going up north rather than down Route. 7. Plus, there was never a rivalry. No kid ever said to me, 'I can't wait to play Howland or Hubbard.' We got pumped for playing teams down the river."

The Potters had the opportunity to join the All-American Conference (AAC), which will begin its charter season this year. Beaver Local chose to join the new league which consists of every MAC and Trumbull Athletic Conference (TAC) team, minus East Liverpool.

"I said no. There was no debate that I can remember" Shansky said of the decision to pass on the AAC. "Our coaches said financially we were getting killed. Then we had teams getting home at 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m. If that's what Beaver Local wants to do, that's fine. But they'll find out, it's not the competition that kills you, it's the travel time."

So for now, the Potters will remain an independent OVAC team. They will take on the opponents the athletic director can track down and make the best of it until, hopefully, a new home can be found.

"We're playing our level or higher this year," McNicol said. "We got out of the MAC, but this schedule is not a cake-walk. You kind of have to take what you get without a league."