Why PA-Stowe? Because the cooperative team era is here

Stowe High’s hockey teams are actually cooperative squads with Peoples Academy, which lost its varsity teams when the rink in Morrisville closed several years ago. A cooperative team is a wrinkle in high school sports implemented by the Vermont Principals Association, which oversees all high school sports in the state, to combat declining enrollment and low numbers of athletes at certain schools. Two schools can form a cooperative team if one or both don’t have quite enough players to field a full team.

Other recent local examples are the cooperative girls hockey team from Harwood-Northfield that took to the ice for the first time this season, and the Fairfax-Lamoille football team.

One school typically hosts the majority of home games in a cooperative agreement — or all of them, in the case of PA-Stowe hockey — and the mascot and uniform colors often stay the same, although some cooperative teams in the state have adopted different team names and mascots after they joined together.

When the Morrisville rink closed, plenty of PA skaters, both boys and girls, still wanted to play, so Peoples and Stowe formed cooperative teams for the 2014-15 season, and there have been Wolves skating as Raiders ever since.

Hockey isn’t the only sport the two schools collaborate on. Peoples Academy’s baseball and softball teams have actually been cooperative teams with Stowe for several years, and last spring PA and Stowe formed a cooperative track and field team, with Peoples hosting that team too.

Even more cooperative teams are on the horizon; PA athletic director Natalie Soffen and Stowe AD Kevin Lipple were scheduled to go before the VPA today, Jan. 31, to propose fielding cooperative teams for boys and girls tennis, boys and girls lacrosse, and field hockey, with Stowe High playing host to all five.

Some of those teams were already member-to-member squads, which allow a limited, set number of students from one school to play a sport at another, but making the teams cooperative opens up the roster for even more PA students to play lacrosse, tennis and field hockey as Raiders. Forming cooperative teams also opens up the possibility of the two schools splitting the cost of fielding the teams, although Soffen said that hasn’t been necessary so far because each school is paying roughly the same amount to operate the cooperative teams it hosts.

With all those teams combining Raiders and Wolves taking the field, or ice, those squads will be referred to as PA-Stowe in the paper.