Wright City Activities Director Rich Lagemann confirmed the split, which will place the school's varsity boys and girls basketball programs into the big-school division. Other schools to be paired with the Wildcats are Bowling Green, Montgomery County, Orchard Farm, Winfield and Elsberry. The small-school division will include Clopton, Community R-6, Silex, Van-Far and Wellsville. The move has been in the works over the past couple of years, Lagemann said, but was approved by the high school principals this summer. Lagemann said the majority of the conference ADs, including himself, were not in favor of the plan. Some of the schools with smaller enrollment numbers, Lagemann noted, felt they couldn't be competitive on a yearly basis playing the bigger schools. "There feeling was there was a separation between the larger and smaller schools," he said. "The EMO might not exist if something wasn't done." Lagemann, who was in charge of a detailed proposal for Wright City to join the EMO beginning with the 2002-03 school year, feels expansion requirements have been loosened. As part of Wright City's requirements to join the EMO, it had to add football, cross country, golf and an academic team. When the EMO expanded to 11 schools beginning in 2007-08 with the addition of Orchard Farm, Silex and Community R-6, not all those schools met the same athletic team requirements, he said. "Wright City had to jump through hoops to get in the conference," Lagemann said. Lagemann said the divisional split is a trial basis only for the upcoming school year. If all goes well, it's likely other sports in the conference - baseball and softball - will go under the same scheduling format beginning with the 2010-11 school year. It's unsure how the split could affect other sports, Lagemann added. Not every school, mainly on the small-school side, fields a girls volleyball or football team. A new entry this year for football is a co-op between Elsberry and Clopton. This will raise the number of football teams in the conference to six, joining Bowling Green, Montgomery County, Orchard Farm, Winfield and Van-Far. Each basketball team will now play a home-and-away series against the teams in their division. In addition, each school will have a rotating crossover game each year which will count toward the conference standings. But each year one team on the big-school side, starting with Wright City this winter, will be considered the "bye" school and won't play any small-school teams. However, the Wildcats will continue to play teams from the other division in the regular season, including Silex, Van-Far and Wellsville in 2008-09, but it just won't be counted as a conference game. Teams on the big-school side will have 11 conference games, one more than in the past two years, compared to nine for the school-school teams. Varsity basketball teams are required by the Missouri State High School Activities Association to play 16 regular-season games and three tournaments or 18 regular-season games and two tournaments. Scott Harris, a Wright City graduate and current AD at Winfield High School, said he doesn't see a problem with the two division split. "I see both sides," Harris said. "You will get to compete with schools that are your size. That will level the playing field. "My thing is, you do it for one sport, you do it for all of them." Dave Chapman, who will be entering his season in charge of the Wright City varsity girls basketball program, is undecided on the move. The Wildcats, who broke a 41-game winless skid last winter, are coming off a 1-22 season. Their lone win was against a conference opponent, Wellsville, a team they will play next season, though technically it will be a nonconference contest. "I'm going to wait and see what happens," Chapman said. " It's going to strengthen our schedule. It will be a lot stronger for sure. "There are some teams year in and year out who are good. Then there are other teams that go in a lull. With my girls, we go one game at a time. We worry about who we're playing." One downfall of the conference split, Chapman pointed out, is the possibility of playing a team several times during the season. For example, the Wright City girls will play Orchard Farm twice in the regular season and could face each other at least two more times in tournaments, including districts. "I don't see how you get better," Chapman said.