The new Northern Buckeye Conference arrives with less impactful change than the City League-to-Three Rivers Athletic Conference realignment.

The NBC is basically the old Suburban Lakes League, minus Gibsonburg, and plus Rossford from the Northern Lakes League and Fostoria from the Northern Ohio League. Gibsonburg, a 1972 SLL charter member, has shifted to the Toledo Area Athletic Conference.

The adjustment is likely to be minimal since Rossford had already included several SLL schools on most of its boys and girls nonleague schedules.

Fostoria's arrival will create the longest trip for most NBC teams and provides the least familiar opponent for them.

"From a standpoint of competition, I don't think there is a major impact," said NBC commissioner Larry Jones. "It's more of a new start and a new look.

"I think they're excited about the whole thing. From top to bottom, I don't think there's any fear [about competitive imbalance]. The farthest distance you have is Otsego to Fostoria.

"Rossford may be a little more inconvenienced than before [in the NLL], but it's certainly nothing compared to what some schools have been going through."

Fostoria spent much of the last 55 years competing against bigger schools in the Great Lakes League (1956-2002) and Northern Ohio League (2002-2011). Only in recent years had an enrollment drop left Fostoria in the same divisional grouping with most SLL (now NBC) schools.

Since 2000, Fostoria's combined boys-girls enrollment in the upper three grades has dropped 36 percent from 588 to 379 students.

Fostoria, like Rossford, went 0-10 in football last year. Rossford enters the NBC riding a 31-game losing streak in football. Both schools should find solace in the NBC.

Fostoria's once powerful football program produced state football titles in 1991 and 1996. But the city has fallen on tough times financially.

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Current Fremont Ross football coach Derek Kidwell was the star quarterback at Fostoria, and his father, Dick Kidwell, was the coach, when the Redmen won the 1991 state championship. The younger Kidwell was named Ohio's Mr. Football that year.

The younger Kidwell has a soft spot for his old hometown.

"When I drive through Fostoria these days, it's really sad," he said, "especially when you look at all the empty factory buildings and empty houses."

Finding the right level

When Rossford vacated the NLL that created an opening which was filled by Napoleon from the now defunct GBC.

Outside of the TRAC membership, Napoleon appears to be a winner.

The Wildcats had raised their level of play in football and other sports, they had been a Division III football school fighting in uphill battles with four D-I teams and a D-II school in the GBC.

Basically chased out of the Northwest Ohio Athletic League after the 1977-78 school year, mainly because of its enrollment size and domination of smaller NWOAL schools, Napoleon played in the former Great Lakes League from 1978 through 1997. The Wildcats eventually exited the GLL because their stature as that league's smallest school had made competing difficult.

That left Napoleon without a league for six years, a nightmarish stretch during which the Wildcats learned the downside of an independent schedule. Finding opponents became a scavenger hunt, the subsequent travel became a financial burden, and Napoleon athletes gained no all-league recognition.

"Our former football coach, John Snoad, told me about those days more than anybody else when I got here in 2002," said Napoleon athletic director Brad Musgrave. "I don't ever want to imagine what that was like. "It was a tremendous relief to be involved in a league just from a scheduling and stability standpoint. The locals were not real happy with it, and many of the coaches weren't happy with it. But everybody knew that we needed to be involved with something instead of just wandering around in no-man's land."

The GBC experience raised Napoleon's level of play.

"It wasn't the best situation for travel," Musgrave said, "but if you ask our coaches today, I'd bet 90 percent of them would tell you it was one of the best things that happened to us because it really made us stronger throughout our sports programs."

Musgrave describes the NLL membership as a great fit.

"Outside of maybe getting into a league with people in our backyard, like Wauseon and Defiance, this is the absolute best fit that could happen to us," he said. "Once Route 24 becomes four lanes from Napoleon to Maumee, it's going to become an even better fit. It's going to be a nice situation for everybody involved."

Outgrown

Like Fostoria, fellow NBC charter member Rossford enters with a similar feeling of relief.

Landlocked Rossford has seen its position in the NLL landscape change in the last 20 years, with districts like Anthony Wayne, Perrysburg, Sylvania (Northview and Southview), and Springfield having much larger enrollments.

"Early in my career at Rossford, we were close to Perrysburg and Anthony Wayne, and we even played them in sectionals," said longtime Rossford AD Chuck Cox, who resigned that position in June. "But, those communities grew large.

"They're no longer the Perrysburgs and the Anthony Waynes of the 1980s and early 1990s. They are large communities with very large student bodies now."

The Bulldogs have found winning difficult in nearly all boys and girls sports over the last 15-20 years. Rossford in the 1960s and 1970s had competed favorably among Ohio's best big-school boys basketball programs, but had subsequently toiled as a Division IV football team in a predominantly D-I and D-II NLL, and as a D-II basketball squad in an otherwise D-I NLL.

"We believe it's a good move for us on a couple different levels," Cox said. "Competitively, we'll be in among schools more our own size.

"There will be some excitement because some of our opponents will be very new, and now we're obviously renewing old ties with Genoa and Eastwood and Lake."

Not so neighborly

Time will tell if Gibsonburg's switch to the Toledo Area Athletic Conference made sense, especially considering a yes vote in favor of allowing Rossford into the SLL would have enabled the Golden Bears to remain in that alignment.

Gibsonburg, one of the SLL's smallest schools, should fare better competitively in the smaller TAAC. Its gate revenue promises to suffer significantly with the loss of league games closer to home against its longstanding neighboring rivals from similarly rural settings at Eastwood, Elmwood, Genoa, Lake, Otsego, and Woodmore.

Future change?

Within the last couple years, the Maumee board of education considered a proposal from their administration to have the Panthers exit the NLL with the intent to join the NBC while it was being formed.

Maumee's board turned that down by a 3-2 vote. Like Rossford, Maumee is somewhat landlocked with respect to development and possible population growth.

Using Ohio High School Athletic Association enrollment counts for boys and girls in the upper three grades of each high school since 2000, Anthony Wayne has gained 192 students to reach 1,047; the two Sylvania schools are up 55 (Northview 911, Southview 965); Springfield is up 50 to 866, and Perrysburg is up 21 to 1,025.

By contrast, since 2000, Rossford lost 54 students in falling to 466, Maumee lost 42 to drop to 753, and Bowling Green's combined boys-girls enrollment fell by 186 to its present 731.

Maumee and Woodmore of the NBC could be schools to watch in upcoming years in terms of potential league changes.

First Published August 14, 2011, 4:15 a.m.