Collins-Maxwell may sever Baxter athletics sharing agreement

MAXWELL – Collins-Maxwell High School and Baxter High School have been part of an athletics sharing agreement since 1988.

Next month, that could change.

A vote will be conducted by the Collins-Maxwell Board of Education on Feb. 16 and the topic will be about the shared agreement that has been in place for the past 25 years.

More than 225 community members — about 100 of which were students — packed into the gymnasium to voice their opinions on the subject Monday night during a Collins-Maxwell school board meeting.

Students from both schools showed raw emotion during the session, expressing that the people who walk the halls and don CMB athletic gear are in favor of continuing the athletic agreement.

Will that be enough to convince the board to keep the agreement intact?

“It never mattered where we lived as long as we are together as one,” Collins-Maxwell High School student-athlete Colin Thomson said. “I have been a Raider all my life. There is no way I will give this up. Never. Not for anybody.”

The “anybody” is a group of about 100 people who want to end the agreement and go back to each high school fielding its own athletic programs.

But the majority of the people in attendance were those that spoke up to continue the current situation.

CMB assistant football coach Jason Aker moved to Baxter 11 years ago. When he arrived, the sharing agreement was already in place. He knew what to expect and he embraced a unique situation.

“The towns depend on each other through our sports, through the relationships we have,” Aker said. “Our kids have great relationships with each other. Maybe our adults need to have great relationships and realize that in huge amounts of ways we depend on each other to keep what we have.

“We’re never going to have Walmarts or huge house subdivisions. We have CMB. We play sports together. We are successful. We love our kids, we love our teachers and we’re all doing the best for our communities.”

Before the sharing agreements, each school struggled to field competitive teams with low numbers and inexperienced players.

In 2014, the Raiders competed so well that the boys’ track and field team won every meet they competed in, including conference and districts.

The football team also had its first undefeated season in program history.

And the student body made it very clear to the board that those success stories couldn’t have been written if the agreement wasn’t in place.

“The things that made us want to share before still exist,” said former Baxter Superintendent and current CMB boys’ track coach Neil Seales said. “We were putting a lot of young kids out there because we had to and Collins-Maxwell was going through the same thing.”

Seales may have the most unique connection to the agreement. He was part of the committee that decided to make the switch to share and is the only coach who has been around through its entirety.

Seales squashes the notion that Collins-Maxwell would have less travel expenses if they weren’t driving back and forth to Baxter for practice and games every week.

Instead, Seales suggests that the travel could be worse because each school would struggle to a put together a schedule that includes opponents who are much further away than teams from the Heart of Iowa Athletic Conference.

“Periodically, these conversations come up and people question it, but the same factors that forced us to look at sharing back in 1988, are still present if not worse,” Seales said. “There is so much consolidation around us. Those small schools that we used to play are no longer around. They are not coming back.

“If we aren’t sharing, we would travel a long ways to find those small schools. We’ll have to play someone and it probably won’t be a level playing field. That’s not fair to the kids.”

Several parents with children in both communities voiced their opinions.

The group who is in favor of a split cited a few other reasons why they feel the way that they do.

Some feel that the coaches who teach in Baxter don’t play the kids who go to school in Collins-Maxwell.

Seales, and even some of the student-athletes, were quick to dismiss those claims.

“We don’t see any addresses. We don’t see Collins, Maxwell, Baxter or Melbourne,” Seales said. “We don’t even think about where kids are from.”

The final reason to make the split, for those who want to see the athletic programs break up, involves where games are held.

Many parents feel like Collins-Maxwell gets the short end of the stick as far as home games are concerned.

Thomson, a Collins-Maxwell senior, spent most of his time on the podium breaking down the facts about that particular topic.

“We played a home football playoff game in Maxwell this year,” Thomson said. “We split the volleyball games. We play all of the soccer games in Maxwell. We play baseball and softball games in Collins. We have the wrestling meets in Maxwell because that’s where the wrestling practice room is.

“We hold the track meets in Baxter because, well, they have a track.”

The student-athletes and community have spoken. The facts are out there. But the school board ultimately has the final decision on the fate of the athletic programs.

Collins Mayor Brett Comegys is in favor of the current agreement and also sent a bit of caution to anyone who wants the situation to change.

“We are looking at this from a short-sided perspective,” Comegys said. “It will cost a bunch of money for Collins-Maxwell to fund its own sports teams. I don’t know what the right solution is, but there are a lot of things that no one is talking about. We don’t have the information that we need to find out if doing this is the best move.”

An agreement change would almost guarantee that neither school would be in the Heart of Iowa Athletic Conference. It also means that the successful Class 2A football team would transform into two eight-man squads.

Seales just doesn’t see many positives for making a change.

“I struggle to find rationale as to why either one of us wouldn’t need the other right now,” Seales said. “We have the longest sharing relationship in the state of Iowa, athletically. There is nothing close. And there is a reason for that. And that’s because what we are doing still works.”

Contact Troy Hyde at 641-792-3121 ext. 6536 or thyde@newtondailynews.com