Every Sunday, my family goes out to eat after church. 

The easy part of the conversation is knowing that we are going to eat somewhere. The difficult part is finding a place that satisfies the cravings of six diverse pallets.

Invariability, it doesn’t matter what restaurant we choose, someone is going to be disappointed. But, we try to please the most without making the minority feel like we don’t care about their opinion.

In a similar fashion, athletics conferences often find themselves in situations where their very existence depends on the vote of the membership or affiliate schools feeling valued.

In 2012, the University of Missouri left the Big 12 after feeling like the conference was catering too much to the will of the University of Oklahoma and University of Texas.

The final straw for the Tigers was the fact that Texas was on the verge of launching the Longhorn Network and that it would not be sharing the revenue from the venture with the other conference schools but expected its full share of revenue from the Big 12 television contract.

In more recent times, we have witnessed even more conference realignment as the revenue each school receives has grown substantially.

On the high school level, if we are being honest, conferences serve the singular purpose of giving athletic directors a guaranteed slate of schools to schedule sporting competition against.

Great rivalries have grown out of these conference alignments. Mt. Vernon and Aurora, Monett and Aurora and Cassville and Monett are classic match ups that still hold meaning to their respective communities.

The Big 8 Conference has seen growth and contraction in the last decade. While the focus was billed as doing what was best for the entire conference, it digressed into schools doing what was best for them individually.

The current Big 8 as structured is now facing another decision regarding its membership. This choice does not revolve in adding or subtracting schools, but instead, what season to play softball.

For almost a decade, the Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA) has allowed districts to choose if they want to play in the fall or spring.

The original logic behind MSHSAA’s offering was that a spring softball season would benefit districts with smaller enrollment. Most of those small districts had trouble field softball teams due to a conflict with volleyball.

MSHSAA noted that many of those schools did not field track and field teams in the spring, so the idea was that a spring softball offering would provide an opportunity to an under served student-athlete population. It would also align the high school season along side the collegiate season.

Mt. Vernon had been working toward adding a softball offering for its students and saw the spring season as its best option.

The Lady Mountaineers have even added two state titles to their resume since. Other Big 8 schools have followed in Lamar and East Newton, and now, there are potentially two more that are discussing the option of switching from fall to spring.

The Big 8 athletic directors are taking a wait-and-see approach to the potential change. 

According to the Big 8 bylaws, it takes five conference teams competing in the same season to have a conference champion.

Currently, the conference does name All-Conference members for each season.

Monett is fortunate enough to have enough participation that it wants to stay in the fall. However, if more teams defect to the spring, the program’s hand may be forced.

Still, the Big 8 as a whole, or even MSHSAA, should have never put itself in this position. As a conference purest, all the member schools should compete in the same season. In this case, fall or spring makes no difference to me, but it should be done as a whole.

I get trying to make everyone happy, but as history has shown, that just isn’t possible.

Jared Lankford is the sports reporter for Monett Monthly and has 15 years experience covering Monett-area athletics. He may be reached at monettsports@gmail.com