[Coach Howard]

Yeah I remember the good old days when we had MJP, WMS, Neon, Cowan, Arlie Boggs, Kingdom Come and Letcher and Beckham Bates over here in Letcher Countyplaying against each other and all teams had quality players and enough to play. But in the past 10 years a few of county elementary schools have shut down and two or three of the existing ones having less than 50 or so kids and half that boys in the 5-8 grades. Right now I only have 6 schools feeding the consolidated team and if we go backwards out of consolidation I worry that we will not have enough kids to field two competitive teams, sure we can field two teams but I'm just not sure we can play the type of schedule that we have been playing. I definitely think that playing in Big Sandy and quality teams like New Harlan, Cumberland, Evarts, Belfry is out of the question. I think that we will have to drastically water down our schedule and pick up much smaller teams than we have been playing against, you've got to admit BooBooBear we have had some real barnburners with New Harlan and I think it has made our kids better over this way win or lose against you guys and it's the same with Johnson Central, Hazard, Perry, Adams, Belfry and many other quality teams. Like I said the administration will make the right move and I have voiced my concerns but I am willing to go back (man I don't like that word back because it's associated with backwards) to multiple teams if that's what they decide is best for our county. If New Harlan is made up of 5 good size middle school that's just one more than we have and we have some really small ones feeding only 3 or 4 players a year. I do like the idea of going to multiple 5th/6th grade teams but I like the way that we are feeding them into one central team preparing them for the big move to the high school but that's just my opinion. The consolidation has also almost eliminated the transferring of schools so that one kid can play on the more dominant team any give year. That was a problem over this way and it hurt other sports and some schools academically on given years that their home school was weak.