COMING HOME: Wildwood High athletics to return to Cape-Atlantic League for 2026-27 scholastic year

Posted: January 1st 1970

By BRIAN CUNNIFF

CapeAtlanticLive.com

The prodigal son is coming home.

In a development that has been rumored for some time now, Wildwood High School’s athletic program will be returning to the Cape-Atlantic League for the 2026-27 season, CAL president and Atlantic County Institute of Technology athletic director Dr. Robert Wagner has confirmed.

The CAL’s athletic directors formally voted to accept Wildwood’s application to the league earlier this month, Wagner said in an email.

Wildwood was a charter member of the CAL since its inception in the 1940s and was long considered one of the league’s cornerstone schools. But the school decided to leave the CAL after 54 continuous seasons after the league forced its struggling football team to return to full varsity status within the league after a couple of seasons competing first as a junior varsity program and then as an independent varsity program. Wildwood left the CAL for the Tri-County Conference beginning with the 2002-03 scholastic year, mostly to help its football team find a more competitive schedule.

Once the West Jersey Football League was formed about a decade ago, however, some saw Wildwood’s existence in the Tri-County Conference as superfluous. The school’s scheduling issues with football have been essentially fixed. The Warriors compete in the WJFL’s bottom division with schools in similar circumstances with respect to the state of their football programs.

Over the past few years, many in the community – including the school’s own student-athletes – pressured Wildwood administrators and school board members to consider a return to the CAL. Quietly, most of the school’s coaches agreed with such a move.

Last spring, a school board member confirmed to CapeAtlanticLive.com that Wildwood was exploring the possibility of a return to the CAL. The rumors picked up steam into the summer and fall as multiple CAL athletic directors confirmed to CapeAtlanticLive.com that Wildwood’s potential return to the league had been listed as a discussion item on the agendas for monthly meetings of the league’s athletic directors.

Tom Kelly, in his first scholastic year as the director of athletics at Wildwood, said he could sense a desire to return to the CAL from the school’s community almost immediately after he was officially hired last summer.

“When I first started meeting with coaches, one of the first things mentioned to me by them and by people in the community was about going back to the CAL,” he said. “As soon as I got into meetings with the coaches, it was one of the first things coming up in conversation. … This is something the coaches and the players wanted.”

“Before we made our final decision to apply to go to the CAL, I sent forms out to all of our coaches and it came back unanimous. Every one of our coaches was in favor of going back to the CAL.”

The Tri-County Conference has had its benefits for Wildwood, the biggest of which has been the ability for its sports teams to compete against mostly Group I schools like itself for its league games. The school’s athletic program has been competitive in most sports and has won its share of Classic Division championships in boys basketball, girls basketball, boys cross country, girls cross country and boys soccer.

But detractors of Wildwood’s place in the TCC have often cited the burdens of long travel, with bus rides of more than an hour and as long as 1 hour, 45 minutes each way to league away games. That often has led to student-athletes missing the final period of the class schedule on days of away games in order to be on a school bus by 1:45 p.m. in order to arrive in ample time for a 4 p.m. start. Student-athletes often do not return to school from away games until after 8 p.m. Return times from basketball away games, which often have 5 or 5:30 p.m. start times, are even later.

Currently, Wildwood’s closest away game in the TCC Classic Division is at Clayton, a bus ride of about one hour, 10 minutes. Bus rides to games at other division opponents such as Gloucester Catholic and Salem and to league crossover opponents such as Glassboro, Overbrook and Woodstown, take much longer.

“Those bus rides are not fun,” said Rich Hans, now in his 25th season as the school’s head baseball coach. He’s also a boys basketball assistant and has previously been a head and assistant football coach and assistant girls basketball coach at the school. “Most times we’re not getting home until after 8 o’clock. We almost always have to stop to eat on the way home because we have kids who sometimes haven’t eaten since 10:30 in the morning.

“It takes a toll on you, and we’ve been doing it for 20-some years now. It’s crazy when you think about it. It’s a lot of miles on a bus over the years.”

In addition, the local community never truly embraced Wildwood’s place in the Tri-County Conference. In basketball, for example, home non-league games against CAL schools have regularly drawn large crowds, often dwarfing attendance at league contests, even ones with division championship ramifications. In short, local fans simply never warmed to competition against the likes of, for example, Clayton, Pitman and Salem. They still preferred to see games against Lower Cape May, Middle Township, Wildwood Catholic and Ocean City or even Pleasantville, Mainland and Buena.

“I like the move for the school as a whole and for the kids and the parents,” Hans said. “Even for the fans, it’ll be great to see the local rivalries come back. We don’t have to go out and try to get those teams on our schedule. They’ll be on there every year.” 

Kelly said the Tri-County Conference athletic directors voted unanimously to allow Wildwood to secede from the league to join the CAL for the 2026-27 season.

Kelly added that the average TCC away game is 60 miles away from Wildwood. He said the average CAL away game will only be 30 miles away.

“The ADs in the Tri-County know we’ve been through the gauntlet with the travel, so they were sympathetic to what we were going through,” Kelly said. “There are times where we’ve had teams traveling two or three times a week, and every game is an hour, hour and a half away. It’s hard on the kids and the coaches. You’re getting home late and then the kids have to get to school on time and get to their studies. That’s expecting a lot out of your student-athletes.

“I think there’s a mix of excitement and relief that we’re going back to the CAL. It just makes sense.”

Wildwood will remain a member of the TCC through next scholastic year before exiting the league to join the CAL. But Kelly said he expects the school to maintain relationships with many of the schools in the TCC.

“There are a lot of great, great people involved in the Tri-County Conference and our relationship is still very strong there,” he said. “It’s not like we’ll never see the Tri-County Conference ever again. We’ll still try to schedule some games with them in some sports. I’m confident we’ll maintain a very good relationship. I have nothing but good things to say about the Tri-County Conference.”

Moving to the CAL will create new challenges for Wildwood, which will now be competing in league games against schools with much larger enrollments. Kelly said he believes an increase in competition can be a benefit for the Wildwood athletics program as a whole.

“I don’t think we would have pushed for this if we didn’t have confidence in our coaches,” Kelly said. “The only possible downside for us being in the Cape is that, for the most part, we’ll be playing bigger schools and we could be at a disadvantage there. But I have complete confidence in our coaches that they’re going to get the job done. I have confidence that our programs are going to rise to the occasion and that this is going to be a very solid transition for us.”

In many sports, the CAL operates under a three-conference system that is tiered toward competitiveness. In theory, the best teams are in the American Conference, the middle-of-the-road teams are in the National Conference and the rebuilding and small-school teams are in the United Conference. Teams regularly move up or down conferences much like the promotion and relegation system seen in European soccer – conference champions move up while last-place teams drop down in each sport after each year. Wildwood’s teams are expected to begin the 2026-27 season in the United Conference. 

Regardless of which conference Wildwood is placed, simply being back in the CAL seems to be welcome news for all involved at the school.

“Obviously there’s advantages and disadvantages to everything,” Hans said. “The disadvantage is that we’ll be playing more schools that are a lot bigger than us. But overall, I think just about everything across the board is better for our students, our parents and our fans if we’re in the CAL.”