FROM EXPRESS TIMES
The Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, the product of the merger of the Lehigh Valley Conference and Mountain Valley Conference, stepped out for its first official public event this morning at Woodstone Country Club in Lehigh Township.
The 18-team conference, made up of Allentown Central Catholic, Bethlehem Catholic, Easton, East Stroudsburg North, East Stroudsburg South, Emmaus,Freedom, Liberty, Dieruff, Nazareth, Northampton, Parkland, Pleasant Valley, Pocono Mountain East, Pocono Mountain West, Stroudsburg, Whitehall, and William Allen, will open its first year of competition in the 2014-2015 scholastic season.
The league will compete in three as-yet-unnamed divisions for most sports, with two divisions in football and three differently arranged achievement-based divisions for wrestling. There will be no independent games in football except on Thanksgiving.
"We worked hard with scheduling to provide balance and parity while keeping existing rivalries," said EPC president and Whitehall Principal Chris Schiffert. "This is all about student-athletes; everything we do is about them, which is why this is important."
The merger took months to work out with, Schiffert said, with an incessant parade of meetings and conferences.
"I was involved in putting the Lehigh Valley Conference together and that was simple compared to this," said Emmaus athletic director Dennis Ramella, the EPC vice president. "This was a bear."
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