Boulder Creek, Cactus Shadows prep for new sports landscape
MARC BUCKHOUT MANAGING EDITOR ~7/27/2011

In less than a month the Boulder Creek Jaguars football team will host the 2011 season opener against the Cactus Shadows Falcons on Aug. 26 in the first matchup in the history of the North Valley programs.
For fans of both schools’ sports programs the 2011-2012 school year will have schedules dotted with new rivals.
Every two seasons the Arizona Interscholastic Association goes through a realignment process in which schools are placed based on their projected attendance figures for the upcoming year.
In the most drastic overhaul in recent memory Boulder Creek went from a 5A Div-II program in the Northwest Region to a Division I program in Section III. Cactus Shadows went from a 4A Div-I program in the Desert Sky Region to a Division II program with their different sports being placed in any of the three different sections.
“Financially school districts across the state have less and less to work with in their budgets,” Cactus Shadows athletic director Rich Swearengin said. “Our sports programs at Cactus Shadows have to be self sufficient. We have an athletic participation fee because we don’t get any money from the district. When it came to athletics our input to the AIA was that cutting down on travel would make a lot of sense.”
For the last two years, the Cave Creek school, located at 5802 E. Dove Valley Road in Cave Creek, has been part of a Desert Sky Region, which included Apache Junction, Queen Creek, Campo Verde, which is located in Gilbert and Combs, which is located in the San Tan Valley along with Tempe McClintock and their closest region rival Scottsdale Saguaro.
“For us to take the football team, the band, the training staff and coaches to places like Combs and Poston Butte you’re looking at close to $3,000 in expense,” Swearengin said.
For the 2011-2012 school year Cactus Shadows, using football as an example, now resides in Division II, Section III where they are paired with the likes of Goldwater High School, Shadow Mountain, Notre Dame, Horizon and Sunnyslope, all in Phoenix, Prescott and Bradshaw Mountain, Scottsdale Chaparral, Deer Valley in Glendale, Kingman, Marcos de Niza and McClintock in Tempe and Perry High School in Chandler.
During the course of the season the Falcons will play six teams from their section. Of their other four games, two were computer generated by the AIA with geography being the biggest contributing factor. Boulder Creek and Pinnacle, a pair of Div I programs were selected and then two games that Cactus Shadows chose on its own, a pair of Div III programs in Queen Creek and Paradise Valley. In previous years, at least in football, a 4A team would never play a 5A team as school size was the primary consideration. The shift now has proximity trumping school size.
“We were talking about these things even before gas prices were more than $3 a gallon,” Boulder Creek athletic director Matt Kuffel said. “There were concerns about all the class time our student athletes are missing while travelling to compete. Priority number one for students is obviously academic success. If it was a problem for Valley schools you can only imagine what it’s like when you look at Kingman the Tucson schools, Yuma. For some of them they’re making trips to the Valley twice a week. That gets a little
crazy. I don’t know how they do it as students.”
Because sectional teams don’t play every other team in their section there no longer will be a region champion crowned.
While some coaches around the state have complained the elimination of regions takes away one of the defining measuring bars that teams use for motivation, the opportunity to hang a region title banner in their gym, Boulder Creek athletic director Matt Kuffel said his coaches are largely supportive of the new setup.
“At Boulder Creek our coaches and our student athletes want to play the best teams in the state,” he said. “When you play half of your schedule against region teams you don’t have a say in that. You look at a lot of our programs and when they get out and play in different in-season tournaments they go to the ones that are hard as nails. They’re excited to make this transition.”
Swearengin is taking a wait and see approach.
“Change is hard,” he said. “When it comes to the new classifications it certainly makes reaching goals more difficult. We want to be able to recognize our outstanding student athletes, but now they’re competing in a much larger pond.”
Kuffel too says that Boulder Creek’s coaches are concerned about how to honor top athletes after the doing away with regions which had coaches vote on an All-Region team including a Region player of the year. The thought is it would be tough to name All-Section teams considering that all the teams in the sections won’t play each other.
As for team accolades, the top three teams in each section will automatically qualify for the state tournament. Along with nine automatic bids there will be seven other teams that will earn their way into the postseason by their power rating, which takes into account a team’s won-loss record and their strength of schedule.
“It’s going to be interesting,” Swearengin said. “We’ve never established anything with Boulder Creek or Pinnacle because they’ve been bigger than us. So we’ll bring them in, but we’ll also try to reestablish rivalries with schools that we’ve been in regions with over
the years like Notre Dame and Chaparral and we’ll keep
our rivalry with Saguaro going strong.”
Boulder Creek and Cactus Shadows, like most football teams, will begin preparation for the 2011 season with the first day of practice on Monday.