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Brent Liskai was the starting point guard for Gibsonburg when the Golden Bears' boys’ basketball team won Suburban Lakes League titles in 1988 and '89.
“Every year it came down to us and Eastwood,” said Liskai, who has been Gibsonburg's head coach for the past nine years. “It seemed like it was always one- or two-point games when we played them. We beat them during the regular season and they knocked us out of the tournament in 1989, when we were back-to-back champs.”
In those days, Gibsonburg played in front of sellout crowds. Players could always count on their fans showing up in droves whenever the Golden Bears played an SLL rival.
“We had a small court and it was definitely a home-court advantage,” Liskai said. “This league has always traveled well. It's a great league.”
Not for long.
The SLL will cease to exist after this school year. Six of the SLL's seven current members are leaving the league to join the newly-formed Northern Buckeye Conference beginning in 2011-12. The NBC will consist of Eastwood, Elmwood, Genoa, Lake, Otsego, Woodmore, Fostoria and Rossford.
Gibsonburg will join the Toledo Area Athletic Conference next year, and that will be a bittersweet pill for many SLL lifers like Liskai to swallow.
“The SLL schools are very similar, the communities are very similar,” Liskai said. “It (the move) is going to be very different for us. I've only been involved in two other school systems, so I've known this league for probably 20 years now. As a kid, I can go back 30 years. It's going to be different, but we'll see what happens.”
Gibsonburg and rival Woodmore have traditionally been two of the smallest schools in the SLL.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association's divisions (Division I, II, etc.) are based on each member school's enrollment figures for grades 9-11. According to OHSAA statistics for the 2009-11 school years, Gibsonburg has the smallest enrollment in the SLL with 138 boys and 132 girls. Woodmore is the second-smallest school, with 140 boys and 147 girls.
By comparison, Genoa has 208 boys and 186 girls, Lake has 213 boys and 192 girls and Eastwood has 241 and 214, respectively.
Smaller enrollment at public schools tends to swing the competitive balance to the bigger schools in any league.
Gibsonburg, for instance, has won two SLL boys basketball titles since 1989. Its girls basketball team has never won an SLL title - the Bears finished second in 2000 and '01 – and the football team hasn't won a league championship in a decade.
That is one reason why joining the TAAC, which consists of smaller schools like Cardinal Stritch (91 boys, 132 girls), Toledo Christian (75 boys, 84 girls) and Danbury (57 boys, 72 girls), makes sense for the Bears.
“Our enrollment is going down,” said Liskai, who is also Gibsonburg's athletic director. “Our classes are averaging 65-75 kids per class. It's turned into a numbers game. Leaving the SLL was a situation we had to explore. It will work out for everybody.”
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