Suburban Tulsa and Its Uber High School Sports

[sendoff]

This was bound to happen.

Some reasonably sized schools are tired of oversized suburban Tulsa high schools dominating their conference sports:

During a recent meeting of Frontier Conference athletic directors, the five western division schools - Bartlesville, Sapulpa, Sand Springs, Stillwater and Ponca City, announced that they were splitting away from the Frontier Conference and forming their own conference with Enid after this school session.

The remaining schools - Owasso, Broken Arrow, Jenks, Muskogee and Tulsa Union - will now meet in the near future to discuss their options.

According to Owasso High School Athletic Director Danny Hightower, it will be difficult to find other schools who will want to join the league with the state's largest and most successful schools.

Link

It's sad that enormity is equated with success. In many cities outside of Oklahoma, new high schools are added instead of existing ones being allowed to grow so large. For instance, Olathe, KS (population 110,000) has 4 senior high schools. Broken Arrow, with nearly the same population, has 1 senior high school.

I guess its too expensive to duplicate the college-level football facilities at a new high school. Either that, or people wouldn't know how to find their identity in their community if it had two separate high schools.