SBC River volleyball overloaded with league matches

There's going to be more SBC River Division volleyball this fall than ever before. But is it too much? Woodmore's addition to the River makes it a 10-team volleyball league. What was a 16-match schedule for each of the past four seasons has grown to an 18-match slate, with every team playing a home-and-home with each other. Ohio high school volleyball teams can schedule up to 22 regular-season contests. For the River, 82 percent of them come against one another. "I really like our River Division; it's a great group of schools," Tiffin Calvert coach Lori Rombach said. "I think an ideal situation would be a single round when you get to this large a number of schools. It's just extremely frustrating for me and my program when I'm trying to build a schedule that prepares us for postseason." For comparison: This fall, the Sandusky Bay Conference Lake and Bay divisions each feature six teams. That means their volleyball league slates are 10 games apiece, leaving space for 12 nonconference games, as opposed to the four out-of-league matchups that River teams can schedule. "I'm excited that so many people want to join the SBC," St. Mary Central Catholic coach Gia Gennari-Lynch said. "Putting them into the River Division is filling us up a lot." In volleyball in particular, that creates an additional challenge because many teams look to schedule tournaments on weekends. Calvert had to drop its trip to the annual Norwalk tourney on Labor Day weekend because it couldn't afford to use up all its non-league matches at once. "For years, I've wanted to do a single round," Rombach said. "When I look at the Bay and the Lake, they have such drastically smaller numbers. I'm a little envious. It'd be nice to play in two tournaments and then grab some other teams for competition." It's not just Calvert, which has gone 16-0 each of the previous four seasons in River play, that is hamstrung by the expanded slate. It affects each team a bit differently. Danbury, for example, routinely plays Port Clinton in a non-league game. There's no shorter road trip for the Lakers, and most of those players know one another. This season, though, there was no space on the schedule for PC. "It's not so much about the trip as it is about crosstown rivalry," Danbury coach Keith Diebler said. "That all plays into it. We're gonna scrimmage them. You're taking away opportunities for some rivalries, too." Danbury plays in the Crestline tournament and has only one other non-league date, its season opener on Aug. 19 at Sandusky. "The basic thing is it's here, you adjust to it, and it's changed our thinking," Diebler said. "Ohio State (camp in July) was one of the changes in thinking. Go to Ohio State and see what happens, see the competition, and when we look at our scrimmage schedule, we've tried to make it as tough as possible. You've got to find some variance." Fremont St. Joseph, in a similar vein, had to drop nearby foe Seneca East. The Crimson Streaks' schedule changed a bit less simply because Woodmore was already a non-league opponent for them and now slides into the league category. "We've played Seneca East since we were in the MAL, and I really liked that game," SJCC coach Paul Grahl said. "I like coach (Greg) Hendrix, he's actually a St. Joe's alum." New Riegel had to drop 15-minute drives to both Arcadia and Carey. Old Fort is no longer playing nearby opponent Fostoria. "Sometimes these decisions seem to get made for the thing that's easiest," Rombach said, "and I don't think that's always what's best for the kids." Rombach doesn't believe the River Division opting for the single round through league play would make nonconference scheduling too difficult to manage. Calvert, a perennial powerhouse and by no means an easy matchup even for the largest schools, frequently gets contacted to add opponents. "It's my opinion that it would not be difficult at all," Rombach said. "I probably received 30 to 35 emails from coaches looking to pick up games." Rombach suggested to her athletic director that River teams that struggled to fill those additional dates could just play each other, again, in a match that wouldn't count toward the league standings. "One time through just allows everybody to realize rankings for conference championship stuff, and then everybody would be able to pick up nonconference games that are more on par with their skill that year with that particular team," Grahl said. "I'm in a position where I would play Tiffin Calvert twice if Lori wanted to play me twice because I want to challenge our girls and I think we're closer to them, and just make the second game nonconference." The league-heavy schedule's impact won't stop at the end of the regular season, either. It will likely have a direct impact on postseason seeding. Every River Division team's résumé will have only a few spots not against one another. That gives outside coaches voting on seeds a difficult task in determining the true caliber of the squads. Less diversity in opponents could also limit the ability of a team to reach its postseason potential, especially since most of the River teams play in the same couple tournament districts. "In preparation for that postseason, the upper half of the league would want to get a variety of teams to play that might challenge their team in a different way," Grahl said. "It pigeonholes us to only find four opportunities to challenge ourselves outside of non-league… Your kids get more out of seeing different teams and different serves and different defenses and all that stuff that's gonna prepare them better to play in that postseason run." The dilemmas from the expanded River will have a very direct successor come the winter, too: basketball. Just like volleyball, Ohio high school basketball teams are allowed 22 regular-season games. And the SBC River Division in both boys and girls basketball will have the same 10 teams as the volleyball league, and thus the same scheduling setup. Diebler, who coaches boys basketball at Danbury along with the volleyball team, will get a double look at this arrangement. "The year (Upper Sandusky) won the state we played Cincinnati St. X in our gym. They ended up winning the state in Division I," Diebler said. "I think it limits a little bit of what you can do in your program if you have any flexibility at all. That takes away a lot of flexibility… When Upper was strong, our schedule was strong. We loaded it up. Back then, we were thinking of our season starting with the tournament. Other than that, we wanted to play the toughest schedule we could play." Those Diebler-loaded Upper teams are the closest comparison the SBC River has to Calvert volleyball. The Senecas already showed their early prowess in a mid-July tournament at Cedar Point Sports Center, going 8-0 in a loaded field to win the gold bracket. Calvert plays crosstown Columbian in mid-September, but then saves its other three non-league games for October against Magnificat, St. Ursula and Liberty-Benton. "It's worked out well for us to try to ramp up the competition toward the end of the season," Rombach said. "It gives our team time to mesh and figure things out. We don't have to have all the answers by August 22. Sometimes it's great for a team when you don't have everything figured out." Mostly, SBC River Division volleyball teams will have to figure things out while playing against each other, a lot. "You take the hand that's dealt you," Diebler said, "and want to make it the best thing possible for your kids."