By Blake Colston
Sports Editor
Conference realignment has reached the high school level and Piedmont is part of the latest shuffling.
Beginning with the 2023-24 athletic year, Piedmont will join the Central Oklahoma Athletic Conference, COAC President Brian Fitzgerald confirmed this afternoon.
The COAC currently includes the districts from Edmond, Deer Creek, Moore, Mustang, Norman, Stillwater and Yukon.
Piedmont, which now is a member of the Suburban Conference, is nearing a move to Class 6A, so joining the COAC makes sense for a number of reasons. Deer Creek made the same transition in 2014 as it approached 6A status.
The COAC began competition in 2014 in an effort to improve consistency with scheduling, to guarantee a set amount of athletic competitions, and to insure the continuation of old rivalries and the creation of new ones.
“People are starting to see that there’s more strength in numbers, so with us having 12 schools in the conference when most conferences are made up of eight, we feel like that’s going to give us a stronger united voice in any issue that comes up,” former Yukon athletic David Fisher said in 2013.
With PHS on the way out, the remaining Suburban Conference members include Carl Albert, Guthrie, El Reno, Del City, Noble and Shawnee.
