By Jeremy Peppas
Stephens Media

NORTH LITTLE ROCK — Kevin Danaher just looks at what could be his schedule and shakes his head.

“Volleyball, basketball, baseball, soccer, football,” Danaher said, ticking off his sports. “We got a lot of miles to put on there.”

Danaher, the athletics director at North Little Rock High School, likely will be preparing for trips for all those sports to Jonesboro, Marion, Mountain Home and West Memphis. The Arkansas Activities Association has assigned the Charging Wildcats to the East for the combined 6A-7A classification for the 2010-11 school year.

“It is going to require some planning,” Danaher said. “I’m not looking for any sympathy, though. Mountain Home has been making those treks for years.”

North Little Rock, the state’s second-largest high school with more than 2,000 students, long has been accustomed to playing most games in Central Arkansas, but not in 2010-11.

“North Little Rock is going to have to go east and they are upset by that,” said Lance Taylor, executive director of the AAA. “But it is just numbers and geography. Forrest City dropped down to 5A and we had to grab a school out of Central Arkansas, and North Little Rock was the one that was geographically closest.”

It is possible that the conference assignments could change again. Several schools have filed appeals with the AAA concerning the reclassification, but as things stand, the state’s 32 largest schools would be combined for the 6A-7A regular season. For the playoffs, the schools would be split in half with the 16 largest schools playing for the Class 7A state championship. The other 16 would compete for the 6A title.

Texas has a similar system for its largest classification and Arkansas’ new plan is modeled on it.

Classifications are good for two years and then schools will be shuffled again, but in a year, North Little Rock could be traveling as many as 1,052 miles round-trip for four of its conference games every sports season.

In the current alignment, which continues through the 2009-10 school year, North Little Rock is in the same conference as Van Buren, on the western edge of the state, and Russellville. But those trips are not as far as the ones proposed, and in that conference, North Little Rock has five games in Central Arkansas.

Under the new arrangement, the only games with quick trips would be Cabot and Jacksonville.

North Little Rock is far from the only school that will be traveling great distances. Regardless of the classification, schools will be hitting the road.

Among others, Cave City, near the Missouri state line, would head 136 miles south to Stuttgart for a conference game, while Mena, near the Oklahoma state line, would travel as many as 169 miles to face Dover.

Taylor said reclassification is one of the two hardest things his office has to deal with — the other is public versus private schools — but that the AAA made a collective decision to stick with eight teams in a conference for two reasons.

“It gives each school seven conference (football) games and then they only have to find three games,” Taylor said. “That helps (the schools) get a schedule and gives them three games where they can still play traditional rivals not in their classification. That helps with gates.”

Gates, as in attendance and larger crowds, mean money for the schools. Some rivalry games draw huge crowds. The annual Salt Bowl between Benton and Bryant has drawn more than 20,000 fans to War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock.

Also, “When we had fewer than eight teams to a conference, you had schools that would avoid playing the very successful teams if they didn’t think they had a chance at a win,” Taylor said.