Pleasant Valley superintendent confirms Colonial League invitation

http://blogs.mcall.com/groller/

FROM KEITH GROLLER

Pleasant Valley superintendent Dr. Doug Arnold has confirmed that his school received an invitation from the Colonial League on Wednesday.

He said his school has until April 9 to decide whether to stay in the Mountain Valley Conference or join the Colonial League, which also offered membership to Lehighton.

These invitations come as a balancing act after the league voted to elevate Moravian Academy and Notre Dame-East Stroudsburg from associate to full-time members. The league is looking for larger schools now to keep some of the larger schools in its 14-member league (including Moravian Academy).

"Our school did receive a letter from representatives of the Colonial League," Arnold said. "And, that letter did invite us to become a member of the league, effective for the 2014-15 school year. At this point obviously, we're taking the letter under advisement and we're going to take a look at what's best for our school and our student participants. That's where we are right now."

Arnold said the invitation will be taken seriously and will undergo an extensive evaluation from numerous angles.

"We've got to get a lot of questions answered," Arnold said. "We have to make sure we have as much fact, information and data that we can gather so we can make an intelligent decision. Our school board must be given information to peruse and make their decision. It's a joint venture between the administration and the board to look at what's best for the student-athletes in our district."

Arnold would prefer to have more time for the decision to be made, but understands that you have to put deadlines on things.

"It is pretty quick to make this decision, but we can probably get our heads together and make an intelligent decision by (April 9)," he said.

Arnold was asked if he was surprised by the invitation.

"You're always surprised when you get something like that," he said. "But you know and I know that there has been talk for many, many years about leagues forming, and not forming, and people invited here and people going there. This is nothing new about this whole notion of realignment of certain leagues and so forth. Until you really get something in hand like that, you are not sure. You hear so many rumors that you never really know what's factual until you actually have a document in your hand."

Arnold said Pleasant Valley has had a good relationship with members of the Colonial League going back to when many of them were together in the Centennial League, which existed from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s.

"A lot of Colonial League teams were actually Centennial League teams before and PV was a part of the Centennial for many years and played the Palmertons, the Northwesterns, the Northern Lehighs regularly. So, we're very familiar with some of those schools.

"And we played teams who have always been Colonial League members, like Catasauqua, for instance, in nonleague games. I was at East Stroudsburg back then and our first game was against Bangor every single year. The schools in the Colonial are very similar to what is in the Mountain Valley Conference."

Arnold said it was too early in the process to outline positives and negatives.

"As time goes on, you have to look at things and with it being a quick time frame, things are going to come to your attention fast," Arnold said. "When you get into this business, sometimes you have to do things quickly. But we'll do what we can to evaluate it as best we can and do what's best for PV."