Mark Koca on new Ozark’s Highlands conference

Pretty much the conference includes what we do now. One of the schools, Butler, doesn’t have cross country.

A few of the schools have wrestling, a few of them don’t. I thnk most of them do, actually.

Q. Will there be academic conference activities?

Definitely. We’re not pinned down on those exactly. We got through a third of the by-laws today in four hours.

We are definitetely looking a academic bowl, speech and debate, music,

Q. How many years has it been?

I’m thinking 25. I wasn’t here when we first got out of the conference.

Just having that ability to make those awards to kids. We’ve gone 25 years without having an all-conference anybody.  That in itself is kind of a big deal because a lot of times kids are looking at some of the middle size colleges, those awards don’t go unnoticed by the recruiters.

Q. Do you have some more schools that may be interested?

We’ve got a couple more. We are not going to talk about them right now.   We do have some interest from some other schools. They obviously don’t want to get the word out and offend their current conference until they are sure they want to jump ship.