Greenwood, Loyal schools agree to co-op for JV baseball

By Valorie Brecht and Cheyenne Thomas

The Greenwood and Loyal school districts have agreed to co-op for junior varsity (JV) baseball this year — something they did last year — however, after hearing from the Loyal baseball coach, they will approach the co-op slightly differently than last year's.

The Greenwood School Board met last Wednesday, as did the Loyal School Board. At the Greenwood meeting, District Administrator Joe Green saici the school had had some discussions on co-oping with Loyal for JV baseball. The Loyal baseball team has a large JV team, some of whom would not receive as much playing time if they remained by themselves. To give those athletes more playing opportunities, he said they were looking into ways to share their JV players for a few games this season.

'There are some players (on Loyal's JV baseball team) that could use more playing time,' he said. 'We're not sure yet, but we're thinking of having about four games where they would play together with our Greenwood JV. We will have to see where that goes down the road.'

Also, the Loyal School Board had an item of 'Approve: JV baseball co-op with Greenwood' on its agenda.

'The reason we were going to do this is, this was a co-op last year, so it's already done. We are looking at an opportunity for some kids to at least get some JV time,' said Loyal District Administrator Chris Lindner.

He then yielded the floor to Loyal baseball head coach Randy Montalvo, who said the co-op JV program was rushed into last year, which created problems. It was not formally approved by the school board until April 24, 2023, when the season was well underway.

Last year there were 10 Loyal JV players and three Greenwood JV players. The Greenwood players were allowed to join with the Loyal team to get more playing time, which Montalvo said he was fine with. However, Montalvo had a Loyal JV player that he moved to varsity and found out after the fact he couldn't move him back down to JV, because per WIAA rules, a player can't be moved from varsity back down to JV when the one team is co-oped and the other not.

Based on this year's JV numbers — 16 for Loyal and four or five for Greenwood — Montalvo wanted to operate this year's

Please see Co-op, page 16