Houston football squad moving to Northern Lights Conference

HOUSTON — When Houston takes the field against Valdez on Saturday it will mark the Hawks’ final regular season game as a member of the Greatland Conference.

Starting next season, Houston will join the Northern Lights Conference, Houston High School head coach and activities director Norm Bouchard said this week.

Houston’s move to the other small-schools football conference was proposed and approved during the annual Region III meetings this week, Bouchard said.

In the last several seasons, coaches in the NLC — which includes Kenai, Soldotna, Skyview, Ketchikan, Kodiak and Homer — had expressed the desire to add members to the six-team conference. Bouchard said it was becoming tougher for NLC teams to find nonconference opponents, and coaches liked the idea of adding more conference games to the schedule.

Originally, Bouchard said, two other Greatland teams — Seward and Nikiski — had been approached about moving to the NLC. While geographically the moves would make sense — the two Kenai Peninsula programs would have joined a conference made up predominately of Peninsula teams — Bouchard said Seward and Nikiski felt they could not regularly compete with many of the NLC teams.

The last five small-schools state champions have come out of the NLC.

Bouchard said of the teams that could have possibly moved to the NLC, he feels Houston has the best chance to be competitive in what is known as a very tough small-schools conference.

“I know that we can go over there and compete,” Bouchard said. “Maybe not for first place this year or next year, but in years to come I know we’ll have enough kids in the school, and we’ll be able to compete in that conference.”

With Houston on-board, the new-look NLC will begin play next season with seven teams.

Barrow, Eielson, Delta, Valdez, Nikiski and Seward will remain in the Greatland. And Monroe Catholic will join the conference in 2009.

To simplify the issue, Bouchard said, the NLC will include programs from schools with an enrollment of 400 students or more, while the Greatland will include programs from schools will enrollment of 400 or fewer.

Contact Frontiersman sports editor Jeremiah Bartz at sports@frontiersman.com.