Krause: Saugus returns to NEC after one full season as CAL member

The Northeastern Conference is whole again.After a year in the Cape Ann League, Saugus has returned to the fold. The NEC?s athletic directors voted last Friday to readmit the Sachems into the league.Now comes the process of making schedules to accommodate the switch, and that?s not going to be easy. But for the sake of all involved, the NEC athletic directors are working feverishly on it. They met for the first time Tuesday, and already reached one important compromise on football. For the 2014 season, the Sachems will play an independent schedule to accommodate the CAL teams that were already on their schedule, and join the league in full in 2015. There will be some wrinkles in other sports, too, to help the crossover. By the fall of 2015, the Sachems should be — once again — fully incorporated into the NEC.?For us, it?s a win-win,” said athletic director Rob O?Leary. “It?s nice to be back in the NEC. Hopefully, our travel budget will go down.?We?re excited to play an independent football schedule this fall,” he said. “We?ll have some NEC teams, some Cape Ann teams, and some other teams too. We?re looking at other teams.”The Sachems have already signed to play Cape Cod Tech and are looking at — but have not solidified — a game with St. Mary?s, according to O?Leary.As for the rest of the schedule, O?Leary said that all 12 Northeastern Conference teams will give first priority to scheduling Saugus, even if it means dropping some of the other non-league games they?d lined up.?It?s a complicated process,” he said, “but it?s easier in some ways because we were only gone a year, and some of these schedules were already in place.”Soccer, field hockey, track, ice hockey and basketball are all set, O?Leary said. There may be some changes in other sports, he said, but nothing drastic.Saugus was a long-time member of the Northeastern Conference until the beginning of this school year, when it joined the CAL. Former principal Joseph Diorio felt the league — which consists of more up-county schools from smaller towns — was a better fit for the Sachems than the more urban NEC, especially in football, where the bigger schools tended to dominate the Sachems physically as well as on the scoreboard.However, the Sachems? fortunes didn?t improve much this season. The football team missed the post-season, as did both soccer teams and field hockey. In the winter, only boys basketball made the tournament. This spring, the baseball team, under first-year coach Steve Freker, has nine wins with four games to go, so it?s very likely the Sachems will make the tournament there.There?s no good guy or bad guy here. Diorio did what he thought was right. It just didn?t work out. Give him credit for trying.If there?s a moral to the story, though, it?s that no matter where you are, there are going to be challenges. There?s no way around it. Part of the education of sports as a co-curricular activity (which is something Saugus principal Mike Hashem absolutely advocates) is working to overcome those challenges.