By Duane Good EDITOR

Friday, Oct. 25 not only marks the final night of regular-season high school football in the Sentinel area. It also marks the last gridiron contests to be played under the Tri-Valley League banner – at least for the foreseeable future. While the TVL will continue in all other sports currently under its umbrella, its 10 longstanding football affiliates are heading in two separate directions come 2020. Halifax, Line Mountain and the merged Millersburg-Upper Dauphin Area program will form the Mid-PenConference Liberty Division. They’ll be joined by Mifflintown-based Juniata; Perry County’s Newport and Susquenita; and Franklin County’s James Buchanan. Meanwhile, Williams Valley is joining Tri-Valley and Pine Grove in a ‘‘co-operative’’ comprised largely of programs from the Schuylkill and Colonial leagues (schools from Bucks, Carbon and Lehigh counties). The Vikings and Bulldogs will be in the cooperative’s Blue Division, along with four other PIAA Class 1A schools, while the Cardinals are in the White Division (mostly 2A schools). 2020 Schedules? With current grid seasons standing at 10 games from late August to late October, Sentinel-area teams no doubt will need to fill out their schedules with non-league contests. Each Liberty Division school has a six-game conference commitment, while Williams Valley will have five for the Schuylkill-Colonial co-op. 2020 schedules are months away from release, so it was not known as of press time whether the local teams now in separate arrangements will endeavor to keep longstanding rivalries alive. (UDA against Williams Valley, for instance.) James Buchanan is a high school of some 700 students in southwestern Franklin County, about 30 minutes from Hagerstown, Md. It is, at this point, a little-known entity to Sentinel-area football programs. The Rockets are a District 3 school but had no football league affiliation for 2019, playing

SEE FOOTBALL DIVISON • PAGE A10