N-O League celebrates its 100th anniversary

This is a very special and significant school year for the Niagara-Orleans League which is celebrating its milestone 100th anniversary.

The league was organized in early December 1927 by six area schools including Barker, Gasport, Middleport, Newfane and Wilson from Niagara County and Lyndonville from Orleans County.

The new N-O League had interscholastic competition in both boys and girls basketball for the 1927-28 winter season and baseball for the 1928 spring season.

Middleport had the distinction of winning the first boys basketball championship defeating Barker 21-20 in a special playoff game held at the Medina armory after the two teams finished the regular season with identical 9-1 records.

Newfane won the inaugural girls basketball championship with an 8-0 record. (Lyndonville did not have a girls team that first year).

It is noteworthy that the N-O continued to have girls interscholastic basketball competition until the mid 1930’s when the sport was reduced to intramural competition. It remained that was until the early 1970’s when the Supreme Court’s Title IX ruling reinstated girls interscholastic sports competition.

Interestingly of the original six schools only two – Newfane and Wilson – have been continuous members since the N-O was founded.

Gasport and Middleport merged in 1944 to form the Royalton-Hartland School District.

Lyndonville left after 1948 to join the Genesee Orleans League which is now the Genesee Region League.

Barker left in 1969 to join the G-R but returned to N-O competition in 1980.

The league quickly expanded to eight teams for its second year (1928-29) with the addition of Holley and Youngstown.

Holley was in the league for just that one year but certainly made the most of it winning the boys basketball championship with a 14-0 record.

Lewiston replaced Holley in the N-O lineup the next year (1929-30).

Lewiston and Youngstown merged into the Lewiston-Porter school district in 1952. Lew-Port remained a member of the N-O until 1961 when the Lancers left to join the Niagara Frontier League (NFL).

The N-O saw a real period of growth in the mid 1950’s as Akron joined at the start of the 1953-54 school year as did Medina in 1955-56 and Starpoint, which was a new school district, came on board in 1956-57.

Akron joined after being in the Erie County League (ECIC) while Medina moved from competing in Section V to Section VI.

Starpoint, which was a rapidly  growing school district, left the N-O after the 2003-04 school year to join the ECIC.

Albion also moved from Section V to Section VI to join the N-O for the 1961-62 school year replacing Lew-Port in the league lineup.

Another new Niagara County school district – Niagara-Wheatfield – also got its start in the N-O League from 1958-59 to 1964-65 before joining the Niagara Frontier League because of its rapidly growing size.

Interestingly, the N-O’s membership has also included a bit of an unusual member in the DeVeaux School from Lewiston (a Military Academy style of school) which competed in the league from the 1944-45 to 1950-51 seasons. The Cadets captured the N-O boys basketball championship during the 1947-48 season becoming the only non traditional public school to accomplish the eat until CSAT (Charter School for Applied Technology) did it during the 2012-13 season.

CSAT competed in the N-O from the 2007-08 to 2015-16 school years.

The N-O League’s lineup of sports has grown dramatically since that original lineup of just three sports during the early years.

On the boys side, football was added in 1946 first as six man teams and then as 11 man squads beginning in 1953. Track was also added in the late 1940’s, cross-country in the late 1950’s, wrestling, golf and tennis in the 1960’s and swimming in the 1970’s. Football became a Section VI Federation sport in the early 1970’s.

On the girls side, basketball, softball, volleyball, field hockey, swimming and cross-country all got going in the 1970’s following the historic Title IX ruling.

The league’s boys and girls soccer competition was organized in the early 1990’s.

The recent trend across the state of merged sports teams has also been very evident in the N-O League lineup. Barker and Roy-Hart are now merged for football, wrestling and swimming while Barker has merged with Lyndonville for boys and girls soccer.

Interestingly, that later merger has brought one of the N-O’s original six – Lyndonville – back into the league as the girls soccer team competes in the N-O while the boys squad is a member of the G-R League.

It has been a century of a good number of membership changes but a steady growth in the number of sports offered for the N-O League’s student-athletes.