By John Millea
The new league will come to life one year from now, in the fall of 2010. The schools involved are Apple Valley, Eagan, Eastview, Rosemount, Bloomington Jefferson, Bloomington Kennedy, Burnsville, Lakeville North, Lakeville South and Prior Lake. All are currently members of the Lake Conference except Prior Lake, which is in the Missota Conference.
This leaves Eden Prairie hanging as the only Lake Conference team left out of the new league. The Eagles will be linked with the four Classic Lake schools -- Edina, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Wayzata -- as a five-team league that will have to find a solution. The reason the Classic Lake dissolved, after all, was the headaches in trying to find enough opponents to fill schedules in all sports.
I just talked to Hopkins athletic director Dan Johnson, who had not heard the news. He was understandably disappointed.
"It probably puts us back in a similar situation to what we have right now," he said. "We'll try to fill schedules, try to fill vacancies with nonconference opponents. It's a huge, huge task. It's unfortunate. We would like to be a good member of a nice big conference and fill up our schedules and fill them up fairly close to home. Maybe that's not going to happen this time."
