As athletic directors and boys basketball coaches at their respective schools, Cornell's Bill Sacco and Quaker Valley's Mike Mastroianni attend a great deal of meetings together.

They usually get around to discussing issues they are facing.

In one of their conversations the idea of the schools, which are located on opposite sides of the Ohio River, coming together to field one football team was brought up.

"It just seemed to make sense," Sacco said. "The superintendents got involved and here we are."

A week ago, the PIAA Board of Control approved a co-operative agreement between Cornell and Quaker Valley for football. That means students at Cornell High School who desire to play football will be on the Quaker Valley team for at least the next two years.

Quaker Valley, which has struggled to reach a .500 record in recent years, will remain in Class AA. The Quakers were 3-7 overall this past season, 2-5 in the Century Conference and in next-to-last place in the standings. Quaker Valley has not been in the WPIAL playoffs since 1999.

"What got things started was that Bill called me and said they had to cancel their junior varsity program because we played them [Cornell] the first game of the season," Mastroianni said. "Then he said he had to cancel the junior high games. That got the conversation started.

"It's really a win-win situation because they are one of the smallest public schools playing football [in the WPIAL] and our numbers have been down lately."

School districts had to summit the number of boys in grades nine through 11 to the PIAA earlier this school year. Those numbers determine in which classification schools will compete for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years.

In a co-operative agreement such as the one between Quaker Valley and Cornell, the total number of boys in the larger school (Quaker Valley) and half of the total number of boys in the smaller school (Cornell) are added together to determine the classification.

Quaker Valley will have 233 boys in the top three grades next year, while Cornell will have 76, but only half of those 76 are used to decide the co-op number. The combined number of 281 is well below the cut off between Class AAA and AA, which is 298.

"We were sort of going by last year's [enrollment] numbers when we started looking at things," Mastroianni said. "Cornell's numbers came in lower than the last time and even using the old numbers we were still in double-A."

"Quaker Valley wanted to see where the numbers would put them before they made a final decision," WPIAL executive director Tim O'Malley said of the co-operative agreement. "They went from being one of the smaller double-A teams [in the WPIAL] to one of the larger ones."

The Cornell Raiders have qualified for the WPIAL Class A playoffs the past two seasons since the school got out of a co-operative agreement with Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Moon. The boys enrollment of OLSH and Cornell had the Raiders playing in Class AA, even though only a handful of players from OLSH played football for Cornell.

OLSH started its own football team two seasons ago.

"We had 22 boys on the football roster this year but 13 of them were seniors," Sacco said. "We didn't have a JV [team], we didn't have a junior high [team]. Rather than get a varsity [schedule] and just hope we were going to have enough for a team, it just made sense to go this route."

The agreement should benefit Quaker Valley, which never seems to have enough skill-position players. Cornell always has a number of good athletes.

"It really is a win-win situation," Sacco said. "And it only takes 10 or 15 minutes to get from our school over to Quaker Valley."

Athletes at the two schools are not strangers. The two teams played each other the first game the past two seasons with Quaker Valley winning, 27-26, this year and Cornell taking the contest, 18-7, en route to a 7-3 season in 2010.

Mastroianni said the players at both schools got together last week at Quaker Valley along with the coaches, principals and athletic directors to talk about becoming one team. He said the meeting went well.

"It's been my impression that the concerns people in the community might have are never there with the players on something like this," Mastroianni said. "Just about all of the feedback I've gotten about this from the community has been positive."

Quaker Valley has an outstanding facility in Chuck Knox Stadium, which has artificial turf, and a fieldhouse for the football team. But Cornell also has Frank Letteri Stadium, which has a lot of history. And how will the situation with the bands be handled?

"We'll get together and work all of that out," Sacco said. "The main thing is that the kids in our school who want to play football will have a team to play on."

In other football news, Vincentian Academy, which has 97 boys under the new PIAA classification numbers, announced that it will field a varsity football team that will play a WPIAL schedule by 2014.

"We had heard rumors they were going to do it, but talk is cheap," O'Malley said. "I don't know if anybody involved in this [at Vincentian] knows what it will cost to start a team."

The WPIAL football steering committee is scheduled to meet Jan. 3 to work out the WPIAL's conference alignments for the next two seasons. There will be 25 WPIAL schools in Class AAAA, 26 in Class AAA, 33 in Class AA (Jeannette and Aliquippa will again play up in classification) and 36 in Class A.