Rosters, opportunities grow with school sports co-ops

Jocelyn Spinelli was the only girl from St. Joseph High School in Harrison who ran cross country last year.

Each meet, the 15-year-old would wear a soccer uniform loaned to her by the school and run as an independent. Her father was her coach. The school doesn’t have an official cross country team because there aren’t enough students interested in participating.

“I would run all by myself and then just sign up for meets, and I would just run in meets,” Spinelli said.

That changed when St. Joseph agreed to a cooperative sponsorship (co-op) with Highlands High School. The partnership allows schools to combine athletes to field a sports team, often when one or more schools don’t have enough athletes to do so on their own. Ideally, it helps students from smaller schools participate in sports.

It’s not an uncommon situation for student athletes in Pennsylvania.

Lyndsay Barna, assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, said co-ops were incorporated into the PIAA bylaws in the 1982-83 school year. PIAA is the statewide governing body for school sports.

In Western Pennsylvania, the idea quickly caught on. There are 50 co-op teams in the WPIAL, which covers the 10-county area around Pittsburgh.

The teams run the gamut from swimming and diving to track and tennis. Five of the co-op teams sanctioned through the 2026 season in the WPIAL are football teams.

Spinelli said she’s just happy to be on a team and have other students to run with. She’s now a part of a four-girl team that represents Highlands, even if it’s unofficial. Highlands had to reconstitute its cross country team after dropping out because of a lack of runners. Highlands is working to get back into official section competition as a WPIAL 4A school. Until then, the girls compete unofficially.

“I ran individually last year, and I decided I wanted an actual coach and team,” Spinelli said.

The story was similar for Lillie Ryan, 15, a Highlands student and the lone member of the school’s cross country team. Without the co-op, there wouldn’t have been a team this year.

“I’ve never actually ran cross country or any sort of track before this,” Ryan said. “I play basketball, and this was kind of another step into basketball to help me improve. I actually really enjoy it.”

Two St. Joseph freshmen decided to run with her when it was announced that the teams would become a co-op.

Their coach, Rich Bogaty, sees no downside to the co-op. The cross country coach was called out of retirement to help breathe life back into the program. There still is no boys team at either school.

“I tried to get a co-op going for the four years that I coached here, and it just never got pushed through,” Bogaty said. “I think it’s going to make a big difference for the sports that are tough draws, cross country being one of them.”

This is Bogaty’s first year coaching a co-op team. He has coaching experience at Highlands and the former Peabody High School in East Liberty. He was a runner in high school and was part of a national championship team at Edinboro University.

“I don’t notice any difference,” he said. “St. Joe’s is so close, so, logistically, it’s not a problem getting the kids here.”

Bogaty said the girls blended seamlessly.

“There are no rivalries,” Bogaty said. “Cross country’s really singular. Everybody kind of competes when they run. And then when they’re done, they’re all friends anyway.”

How it works

The PIAA has nearly 2,000 co-op agreements across 36 girls and boys sports, Barna said.

For schools to create a shared team, the districts must be “contiguous,” meaning they share a geographical border. But the PIAA board can waive this rule. In 2019, the board made an exception for West Greene School District to allow a co-op in boys soccer with Albert Gallatin, even though the districts don’t touch.

Other requirements are drawn from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Barna said that, under Education Department guidelines, students who are homeschooled are counted in their home district enrollment and therefore participate in the district of residence.

The host school leads the co-op application process and gets to have its district’s name on trophies.

Transportation of students to practices and games is left to the partner schools to work out.

To determine what classification a co-op team will compete in, the PIAA came up with a formula based on enrollment. For co-ops, the total male or female enrollment of the host school district for a boys or girls team, respectively, for grades nine through 12 is added to half of the same enrollment for the smaller or guest school.

The rule was put into place to help small schools participate but to keep two large schools from combining.

Sometimes, the combined co-op team ends up competing in a higher classification.

Burrell School District’s swim team, for example, competed at the 2A level but will compete this season in the 3A classification because of a co-op it formed with Kiski Area School District. It’s a trade-off for greater participation.

This is the first year Burrell has been able to offer swimming for middle school students, which is an upshot of the co-op agreement, said Brian Ferra, Burrell’s athletic director.

The district entered a co-op with Kiski Area acting as the host school for the middle and high school boys and girls teams. Ferra said the agreement is set for two years. At the end of that time, the schools will reevaluate the partnership.

“We had less than 10 kids on varsity (last season), and the program wasn’t growing,” Ferra said. “We wanted to see if a co-op would help build it, especially from the middle school level up.”

Burrell’s swim team participation numbers had been dropping for years. Ferra said he isn’t sure what the numbers for this season will look like yet because the season doesn’t start until winter.

“The only difficulty we’ve really had is that the (high school) kids are going to be swimming at a higher level now,” Ferra said.