The South Heart and Belfield school boards have unanimously agreed to send their application for a boys basketball cooperative agreement and team name change to the North Dakota High School Activities Association.
Although the boards both collectively approved the co-op, South Heart principal Curt Pierce said only a few community members voiced their disapproval of the proposed merger.
"It hasn't been a major or real controversy," Pierce said. "We haven't heard a lot of people against it. I think people realize it was going to happen and here it is."
Belfield's school board voted Tuesday while South Heart's voted Thursday. The co-op application was sent off Friday morning.
The application would merge all high school and junior high athletics in the South Heart, Belfield and Billings County school districts and rename the athletic teams the Heart River Cougars.
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Belfield's purple and silver and South Heart's maroon and gold colors would also be dropped in favor of a new Navy blue and Vegas gold combination.
The schools currently co-op in girls basketball, football, golf, track and field and volleyball. In those, they compete as either the South Heart-Belfield Eagles or Belfield-South Heart Bantams.
Boys basketball is the final sport the schools have yet to combine in. Because of this, school district families voted whether or not to change the team name and nickname.
However, Pierce said the majority of flack South Heart received had to do with the team name and nickname changes.
"You lose your identity a little bit when you lose your mascot," Pierce said. "But we haven't heard a lot of negative about it."
On Friday, the NDHSAA posted the proposed co-op on their Web site for two weeks and conduct a survey of schools in the area to determine whether or not the co-op is acceptable to Belfield and South Heart's competitors.
"We haven't received any resistance from anyone in the area, so we would expect it to go through," Belfield principal Jeff Lamprecht said. "We don't anticipate any trouble with it."
The NDHSAA board of directors can't vote on the potential co-op until after April 27, which means it's likely the vote won't happen until early May.
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Lamprecht said the longer the NDHSAA waits to decide the co-ops fate, the tougher it will be for the school to purchase uniforms for fall sports.
"We've already been looking at possible outlets for uniforms and seeing what prices would be," Lamprecht said. "If and when they give us the word that we can do this, we're going to be ready to go."
