Hello, old friends.

Waterford Kettering and Mott appear set to re-join the Oakland Activities Association, ending over a decade-and-a-half stint combined competing elsewhere in the Kensington Lakes Activities Association and Lakes Valley Conference.

Rumors of the move had began to circulate in recent weeks, and the district’s membership application to the OAA was confirmed on Tuesday.

“We are grateful for the competition we have been privileged to experience as a member district of the LVC for the past eight years,” Waterford School District director of communications and community relations Sarah Davis said. “Many factors went into our decision to apply for membership to the OAA — such as competitive alignment with like-districts, game proximity, and academic and student leadership advantages. These opportunities will best serve our Waterford School District athletes, coaches and families now and into the future.”

Both Waterford schools were charter members when they, along with Clarkston, Lake Orion and Pontiac Northern joined from the Greater Oakland Activities League to help form the OAA with schools from the Metro Suburban Activities Association and Southeastern Michigan Association back in 1994.

However, in 2008 the pair of WSD schools jumped ship when the merger of the Kensington Valley Conference and Western Lakes Activities Association helped form the KLAA, a 23-school conference that included the newly opened South Lyon East.

In 2017, nine of those KLAA members, among them Mott and Kettering, split to create the Lakes Valley Conference. When it joined the LVC, Mott and Kettering’s enrollment numbers were neither the largest or the smallest in the conference, notable as other KLAA program’s student bodies were larger.

While a variety of factors have led to declining enrollment numbers throughout the state, and LVC schools have been no exception, it has been sharp enough that Mott and Kettering were now both in the bottom-third of the league, and may find themselves again playing more similarly sized programs in the OAA.

That has been reflected from a competitive standpoint. The LVC website charts year-by-year all-sports standings for both female and male sports. In the first six years of the conference, Mott and Kettering averaged finishing in the bottom-3 of the table in female sports, and the same could be said for male sports, with the exception of 2017-18 when Mott had exceptional seasons in baseball, basketball and football to place in the upper-half.

A source said that the LVC, now down to seven schools — Lakeland and Milford, along with the South Lyon and Walled Lake schools — intends to discuss filling the spots the Captains and Corsairs would vacate.