Opinion | Save KingCo alliance

Cheese buses.

That's what kids call those great big yellow boxes on wheels that the rest of us know as school buses.

I am now a few laps past 50 years old, and have been a junior-varsity coach for a Seattle public high school for a decade. And that means I still spend plenty of time riding vinyl bench seats on cheese buses.

Ten years ago, a bus carrying Garfield High School's inner-city volleyball team pulled into the parking lot of an affluent high school on the Sammamish Plateau. Our young athletes stared with wonder; few realized that a public school could look so clean, modern and spacious. One said she felt as if we'd arrived at a mall. Another wondered if she'd see any non-white faces on the campus.

That same year, players for a different Eastside team made the short drive across the lake for their first visit to Garfield's historic gym. This time, our visitors did the staring; the graffiti, the filthy bathrooms, the raucous hallways made some tremble and others sneer. Most seemed anxious to get back on the bus the moment the match ended.

Why, then, were we in the same league?

By 1996, three storied Seattle schools -- Garfield, Roosevelt and Franklin -- had grown much larger than the rest of their Metro League brethren, and were forced to set off in search of a new athletic home.

An invitation came from across Lake Washington, home to the suburban schools of the KingCo Conference. Initial concerns about increased time and expense of travel were trumped by a rather idealistic consideration: It would be a unique opportunity to bridge the social, racial and economic divide between city and suburb. Ballard opened its newer, larger campus, and joined us in 2002.

In most sports, the first few years were difficult. Eastside schools, with superior facilities, weight rooms, financial support and strong junior-high sports programs, regularly mowed down those of us in the city. At one point, the Garfield varsity volleyball team lost 36 matches in a row.

More important, there seemed to be little meaningful dialogue between opposing schools. City schools thought suburban kids were spoiled and superficial; Eastside kids assumed we were undisciplined and possibly dangerous.

But everything changed.

Several city sports began to emerge as statewide powers. Champions arose in swimming, tennis, cross country and track and field; city teams in soccer and gymnastics became contenders. Garfield's volleyball team improved to become one of the best in the league, while Ballard's football team reached the state-championship game. Boys and girls basketball continued to dominate.

Best of all, walls started crumbling.

Kids from the city and suburbs began to see each other as something other than clichés. In volleyball, Seattle girls joined offseason club teams and became close friends with Eastside players. Volleyball coaches began meeting several times a year, forging friendships of their own. Kids began to see beyond the graffiti and the spacious hallways and started looking forward to visiting each other's gyms.

Now, however, some within the Seattle School District want to dismantle those bridges we worked so hard to build.

Ostensibly, the district tells us it has become too expensive to pay for all those cheese buses to cross the lake. They also claim that lengthy commutes to the Eastside force students to miss classroom time.

But those reasons don't add up.

The physical distance between 4A city schools and some of their KingCo 4A rivals is actually less than the commute whenever Ingraham and Nathan Hale in the north face Chief Sealth and Rainier Beach to the south. And thanks to today's crowded roads and highways, it is often almost as fast to use diamond lanes to commute to many Eastside schools as it is to negotiate busy streets in the city. Few athletes have to miss class time to commute to their contests.

Further, the district does not pay for buses by the mile. Neither does it pay by the hour; many sports run for uncertain lengths (extra innings and mercy rule in baseball and softball; overtime in basketball). Instead, the district pays a flat fee for each bus ride, whether the opponent is five miles away or 15, or whether the contest lasts two hours or four. Although the district says it will save money by taking the four 4A schools out of KingCo, it hasn't explained how.

There are some, we are told, who long for the days when Seattle School District students only played each other. That was also back when high schools were of similar size. These days, Garfield's freshman class is larger than the combined sophomore, junior and senior classes of several of the schools we'd be forced to play if we're brought back into the Metro League.

If this move is being proposed to give Garfield, Roosevelt and Franklin's football teams some relief from beatings they usually get from Eastside schools, it merely shifts that burden -- in all sports -- to the smaller public schools.

It's time for the district to offer better reasons for pulling out of KingCo. The issue deserves the attention of the district's incoming superintendent and of the full school board. Before anyone decides, they should hop on a cheese bus next time we cross the lake.

Jack Hamann, junior-varsity volleyball coach at Garfield, is an author and freelance journalist.