Waverly Shell-Rock officially booted from NEIC

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

The executive board of the Northeast Iowa Conference voted 5-1 on Friday to remove founding member Waverly-Shell Rock from the 102-year-old athletic conference.

Waverly was the lone dissenting vote on the board, which is made up of superintendents from member schools Charles City, Decorah, Howard-Winneshiek (Crestwood), New Hampton and Waukon in addition to Waverly-Shell Rock. With the passing of the resolution a second time, Waverly-Shell Rock will no longer be a member of the NEIC effective June 30, 2023.

On April 4, the resolution first passed on a 5-1 vote. Under conference rules, removing or adding schools to the conference must go through a three-step process — a first vote by the executive board takes the matter to each of the schools’ boards before a second and final vote by the executive board.

Earlier this month, the Charles City School District Board of Directors directed Charles City Superintendent Mike Fisher to vote to sustain a resolution to remove Waverly-Shell Rock Community Schools from the conference.

The resolution was aligned with the recommendation of a community task force which studied this matter two years ago. It passed 4-1, with board member Dr. David Schrodt voting against.

The Crestwood, Decorah, New Hampton and Waukon school boards all also agreed with taking the conference to five teams, and that led to last Friday’s final vote.

New Hampton — the smallest school in the district — led the push to remove Waverly.

Waverly-Shell Rock is the largest school in the conference, and New Hampton and some of the other NEIC schools have expressed frustration, as they are unable to consistently compete with the much larger school. There have also been recurring complaints of poor sportsmanship.

New Hampton Superintendent Jay Jurrens said the conference superintendents will meet in the near future to discuss sending out invitation letters to a number of schools in an effort to expand the conference, as a five-team conference is not sustainable.

Rumors have circulated on social media that the NEIC is interested in schools like Osage, Sumner-Fredericksburg, North Fayette and even Oelwein, which was a member of the conference until this school year when it took up membership in the North Iowa Cedar League (NICL).

The same seven schools made up the NEIC from 1970-2020 — Charles City, New Hampton, Waverly-Shell Rock, Oelwein, Crestwood, Decorah and Waukon. It went down to only six schools starting in 2021, when Oelwein, another founding member school, left for the NICL.

Oelwein’s departure from the NEIC, in effect, began the potential conference realignment process. In February, the Upper Iowa Conference invited 10 schools to submit applications to join the conference. Among those schools were the three smallest NEIC schools — New Hampton, Waukon and Crestwood. Should any one of those three schools depart, the NEIC would no longer be viable as a league.

Charles City was one of the founding member schools of the NEIC in 1920. Charles City left the conference in 1939, then rejoined during the 1946-47 school year, and has been a member since then.

In September of 2020, a task force told the school board it recommended Charles City leave the NEIC and form a new conference.

The recommendation called for Charles City to exit the Northeast Iowa Conference within two years, and form its own conference and recruit schools into the conference that share Charles City’s values of character and competence.

The recommendation came on the heels of an incident that took place during a baseball game at Waverly-Shell Rock. The district formed the task force — made up of students, coaches, staff members, board members, parents and alumni — after racist jeers were directed a Charles City outfielder during a varsity baseball game.

In 2020, Fisher said he had talked to 10 other schools, and all 10 expressed interest in joining a new conference, including most of the current NEIC members. The one stipulation was that Waverly-Shell Rock not be included in the new conference. That idea never came to fruition.

Jurrens has also said that that the NEIC would never going to be able to expand with Waverly in the conference.

Waverly-Shell Rock has 596 students in grades 9-11, which is the enrollment the two state associations will use to determine classifications for the 2022-23 school year. Decorah is a distant second in the conference with 430 and is followed by Charles City (399), Crestwood (305), Waukon (286) and New Hampton (272).

Although the NEIC is most known for athletics, it also sponsors a music festival, a leadership conference and other academic events.

– New Hampton Tribune Editor Bob Fenske contributed to this report.