Franklin’s athletic conference is locked in for the next four years.
For the past two years, debate has raged over the N.C. High School Athletic Association’s upcoming quadrennial realignment, wherein its nearly 450 member schools will be re-sorted into new conferences and classifications next school year. After nearly three months and three proposed draft realignment structures, the Mountain Seven Conference will stay largely unchanged until 2029.
Per the final realignment structure, approved in a 16-1 vote by the NCHSAA Board of Directors and released Thursday, March 6, the current Mountain Seven – Franklin, Smoky Mountain, Pisgah, Tuscola, and North, East and West Henderson – will join Brevard in a far western conference including teams from both the new 4A and 5A classifications. While all eight schools will vie for the same conference titles, they’ll compete in separate state playoff brackets according to classification.
Following an April 2023 vote to split its four current classifications into eight, last November the NCHSAA released their official reclassification list. With average daily enrollments ranging from 994 to 1,050 students, Franklin, Smoky, North and West were moved from the current 3A classification into the new 5A, which features schools with enrollments from 956 to 1,205. East, Pisgah, Tuscola and Brevard reported slightly smaller enrollments, and were sorted into the new 4A.
Franklin’s enrollment of 1,010 does not include students from Macon Early College, Bartram Academy or the Macon Virtual Academy, who had previously been allowed to compete for Franklin by the Macon County Board of Education in December 2021. Following another BoE decision last June, MEC’s roughly 130 students will again be barred from competing for Franklin next school year, in an effort to keep its enrollment from counting towards the Panthers’ total. Bartram Academy principal Brian Moffitt said last year his students would also be barred.
Because MEC/Bartram/MVA athletes were eligible to play for Franklin in 2023-24, their combined enrollment of more than 250 were included in Franklin’s total of 1,274. If allowed to continue competing for Franklin, those schools’ numbers would have bumped Franklin up into the new 6A, necessitating tougher competition and further travel.
Following the exclusion of his athletes from Franklin, MEC principal Caleb Parham said students and parents showed significant interest in forming the school’s own athletic program, and gained approval from the BoE in October to further explore the possibility. In November, Parham told The Press that the school plans to begin offering sports next school year. While it likely won’t have the numbers to join the NCHSAA as a full member, he said he plans to apply this spring to compete as an independent school in sports like swimming, track and field, cross country, and potentially volleyball and golf.
For Franklin, the new conference matches the one proposed in an initial draft realignment released Dec. 18, before a second draft released Jan. 21 added 5A schools Enka, Erwin and North Buncombe to create an 11-team conference. That proposal was scrapped in a third draft however, amid fears that its full conference schedule would take up an entire 10-game football season. Aside from its own 11 schools losing early-season nonconference games, which teams use to round into midseason form before playing their rivals, the proposed conference would have presented a challenge to other far-western schools, who regularly play such games with the Mountain Seven.
Ahead of the final realignment released March 6, multiple WNC schools filed appeals to the NCHSAA regarding Franklin’s eight-team conference. By a vote of 13-0, the Board of Directors denied Enka’s request to form a conference including itself, Erwin, North Buncombe and the four current Mountain Seven 5A schools. North Buncombe rebuffed Enka’s advances however, asking to trade places with West and North Henderson in Franklin’s conference. That proposal, which would have moved West and North to the new 5A/6A conference including Asheville, A.C. Reynolds, T.C. Roberson, Enka and Erwin, was also voted down unanimously.
In adding Brevard to the current Mountain Seven, the new conference serves as a reunion of sorts, after the Blue Devils battled Franklin, Pisgah, East and Smoky in the old Mountain Six from 2017-2021. Brevard has spent the past four years in the Mountain Foothills Conference along with Hendersonville, Polk County, East Rutherford, R-S Central, Chase and Patton. Elsewhere in Macon County, Nantahala and Highlands’ Smoky Mountain 1A Conference will also stay largely unchanged. The conference’s current members joined Summit Charter and Rosman in a proposed 1A/2A conference, with Cherokee, Hayesville, Murphy and Swain moving up to the new 2A.
With its 2025-29 realignment in place, several questions still remain for the NCHSAA, including playoff formats and its 2025-26 calendar.