Greenwood to continue discussion on potential basketball co-op with Granton

By Cheyenne Thomas At its board meeting on Dec. 9, the Granton School Board voted to approve a basketball co-op with the Greenwood School District beginning in the 2025-26 school year for middle school and high school. At its board meeting on a little over a week later, the Greenwood School Board considered the co-op, ultimately deciding that they wanted more discussion and feedback from the Greenwood community before making a decision.

Greenwood District Administrator Joe Green told the board Dec. 18 he had been communicating with Granton District Administrator Nancy Popp about the potential for a two-year basketball co-op between the two districts beginning with the next basketball season. If approved, the two districts would split games and practices as evenly as possible between the two districts and split costs 50/50.

“They would host some practices and games and we would host some practices and games,” he said. “Granton has two very nice full-size gyms so there would be facility benefits to working with them. There could be early practices for everyone with gym space like that.”

The districts would have until Feb. 1 to approve a co-op for the next season. When asked about the numbers of players Granton had, Green said currently Granton has nine high school boys and 12 high school girls participating in basketball at the JV level. With the size of Granton, he said a co-op with them should keep them in the same division they are currently playing in.

“In Granton, I imagine the number situation is similar to ours in that they have kids playing the sport because they have their friends begging them to play so they would have enough to play a full team,” he said. “Maybe if our two districts would combine, there would be less of that and we would have kids that were there because they really wanted to play because they love the game.”

After listening to the proposal of a coop with Granton, the members of the board asked about how a partnership with Granton would affect their co-op

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agreements with Loyal. On its agenda the same night of Greenwood’s meeting, the Loyal School Board was discussing a potential girls basketball co-op with Greenwood. The members of the board felt that not knowing what Loyal’s decision would be would make it hard to justify rushing to make a decision right away.

The members of the board also expressed interest in investigating what the community thought about a potential coop with Granton, and wanted to have some time for word to spread to allow the public to comment prior to any decision.

“Right now we don’t have any real gauge on what our people want us to do,” said Eliza Ruzic.

The board eventually passed a motion to table discussion and a decision on whether or not to co-op with Granton for basketball until its January meeting. During the next month, there were to be further discussions with the Granton School District, its coaches and the coaches and players from the Greenwood School District to help give the board a better idea on what the general attitude and consensus would be from the public on a co-op.

In other action taken by the Greenwood board at its Dec. 18 meeting, the board approved a 66.03 agreement with the Granton Area School District to have its band and choir students bused over to Greenwood for the remainder of the school year to be taught by Greenwood’s band and choir teacher, Michelle Kuehl.