New school will be 2-A, joining Cummings & Graham
By Bob Sutton
Special to The Alamance News
Plans are in the works for sports teams of the soon-to-open Southeast Alamance High School to play on the varsity level in the school’s first year.
George Robinson, who’s athletics director for the Alamance-Burlington School System, said the next few weeks will be crucial to setting the foundation for the school’s athletics department.
The process to hire an athletics director will accelerate in January and finding the school’s first football coach is also high on the to-do list.
“We have to have some of that stuff figured out,” Robinson said.
Southeast Alamance will be part of the Mid-Carolina Conference, which will swell to nine schools. Jerry Talley, who’s commissioner of the conference, said he has been given the go-ahead to put together league schedules that include Southeast Alamance for the 2023-24 school year.
Robinson said identifying the first football coach is crucial because usually that’s the program with the most participants and the most assistant coaches that will need to be hired as well.
The new coach will want to begin setting a plan and formulating a roster, which most likely will consist of students currently at Eastern Alamance or Southern Alamance.
“With a new school, none of us have ever done that before,” Robinson said of getting the personnel in place from scratch.
Principal Eric Yarbrough, formerly of Eastern Alamance, is expected to play a key role as well.
Talley said there are challenges in scheduling for a nine-team league with only so many regular playing dates available for sports that call for home-and-home matchups in a season.
Yet for Robinson, the large conference is a luxury because much of the scheduling for the new school will take care of itself.
For football, an eight-game conference slate leaves room for only two non-league games.
In 2023-24, the Mid-Carolina Conference will include nine schools, an unusually large number for a conference. It grows from seven this school year because of the addition of Southeast Alamance along with Northwood dropping from Class 3-A per the North Carolina High School Athletic Association’s ruling last month.
Those two schools will join Cummings, Graham, Bartlett Yancey, Chatham Central, Seaforth, Jordan-Matthews, and North Moore in a conference that runs from Yanceyville to Siler City and nearly to Pinehurst.
Southeast Alamance will be a Class 2-A school. The Mid-Carolina Conference is a split league with Class 1-A and 2-A schools, something that Robinson said helped make the decision to participate right away at the varsity level.
“That’s the game plan,” he said. “Giving the 1-A, 2-A split, we think we can be competitive,” he said.
The nickname of Stallions has been selected and a logo developed to represent the school.
Robinson is handling athletics director-type duties for Southeast Alamance, such as ordering supplies needed for fall sports teams.
