In years past, Leesville’s athletic conference has involved the same eight schools. Over the summer the Wake County Athletic Association met to discuss a change to the previous system, resulting in a rotation of the schools involved in the conference. Previously named “Cap-8” is now “Cap-7”.
The schools that were in the same conference last year were: Broughton, Sanderson, Millbrook, Leesville, Wake Forest, Wake Field, and Enloe. While a few of those schools will still remain to be a part of our conference, there are a few additions and a few that have moved to a different conference. The new conference includes Enloe, Leesville, Broughton, Cardinal Gibbons, Southeast Raleigh, Millbrook, and Sanderson.
“The North Carolina High School Athletic Association every four years does realignments. I think that they just draw different lines based on the size of schools that move from 3A to 4A; they change so they try to keep the 4As together… I also think it helps with not playing the same teams over and over again in conference,” said Jack Rogers, Leesville Athletic Director.
The greatest change to the conference is the edition of Cardinal Gibbons considering that they are a private school competing in a previously all public school conference. The addition of Southeast Raleigh is also a pretty drastic difference as it used to be a part of the GNRC (Greater Neuse River Conference) because it is nearly twice as far away as other high schools.
When asked about how the conference change might affect the teams, Rogers said, “I think Leesville is Leesville. I think one of the best quotes I heard last year was when Alex Hunter [was being interviewed for] the state basketball championships a reporter asked him: ‘What’s the game plan? What are you going to do when you get out there?’ and he said ‘We’re just going to be Leesville’ and I think that’s what we do here. We do what we do and it doesn’t matter if we’re playing the best team in the state or the worst team in the state. I think we do what Leesville does and we work hard. I don’t think [the conference changes are] really going to affect us that much.”
Be sure to come out and support Leesville’s fall sports teams in this year’s Cap-7 games and meets coming up in October.
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