NEW PARIS — This past spring, Mark Clevenger must have felt that the telephone was becoming a permanent attachment to his ear.

When Chestnut Ridge was unable to become a part of any of the local conferences, the Lions’ athletic director was charged with putting together football schedules for the varsity, junior varsity and junior high programs.

It was a challenging assignment.

Ridge played in the Laurel Highlands Conference until 2000, when it joined the Inter-County Conference and then was in the Mountain Conference, where it never played a game, withdrawing in 2008 to become an independent.

Chestnut Ridge, which also toyed with the idea of forming its own league, had an agreement with the WestPAC the last few years to fill in their bye weeks created after Turkeyfoot Valley joined with Rockwood for football. But the Heritage and WestPAC got together to fill each other’s open dates, leaving the Lions to scramble.

“Being an independent is tough because obviously if you’re in a league, you get a guarantee of schedule on all levels – varsity, junior varsity, junior high and seventh and eighth grade,” said Clevenger, who has been the AD at Ridge for 10 years. “As an independent, I had to fill 10 weeks of varsity games as well as all the other levels.

“I spent a lot of time on the phone, researching websites, finding open dates, teams in state and out of state and then contacting them and checking weeks and started piecing a schedule together. There are plenty of schools in a similar situation to us. A lot schools have league games, but they don’t get a full schedule so they were looking to fill out their schedules.”

But Clevenger had to find the right fit for the Lions.

“We were looking at teams from the Carolinas, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia,” the athletic director said. “We are a small Class AA school and there were lot of super-sized schools that had open weeks and we had to look competition-wise what was best for us.

“Contacting other schools, there were some we didn’t want to play and others that didn’t want to play us.”

With current state budget constraints on school districts, Clevenger also had to take into consideration the travel aspect of his schedule.

“We wanted to keep it as close as we possibly could, but we still needed to fill a schedule,” Clevenger said.

The 2012 schedule features seven new opponents for the Lions.

“With a schedule like this there are a lot of unknowns,” Chestnut Ridge varsity football coach Max Shoemaker said. “Most times you have some expectations with the teams you play and even when you pick up a new team in the area, you have some knowledge of them. We’re trying to look at the positive that while we don’t have much knowledge about many of these teams, they don’t know very much about us, either.

“We are going to make the best of it and look at it as an opportunity to travel to different parts of the state.”

Ridge will open the varsity season hosting Central from Martinsburg. In Week 2, the Lions play host to Carrick from Pittsburgh before heading east to Berks Catholic in Reading and north to Bald Eagle Area in Wingate.

Philipsburg-Osceola comes to town in Week 5, then Ridge has three straight road trips to face Mountain Ridge in Frostburg, Md., Kutztown (Berks County) and Fort Hill in Cumberland, Md.

Chestnut Ridge ends the season with back-to-back home games against Allegany, also out of Cumberland, and county rival, Bedford.

“We know a little bit about traveling, having played Greenville (out of District 10) the last couple years and Keystone (District 9) last year, so the kids have some experience with making those long treks,” Shoemaker said. “There are a lot of unknowns about the quality of athletes.

“There’s no doubt there would be more local interest playing local schools, but because of past decisions, that’s not an option and we are not in a position to do that. We are hoping that something will change in the future.”

After Clevenger put together the varsity schedule, he began the even more challenging junior varsity and junior high slates.

“Varsity was not the big problem since their games are on Friday night,” Clevenger said. “Doing a JV and junior high schedule where you’re traveling Mondays and Thursdays during a school week, you are certainly going to want to keep them closer to home. We don’t want them out all hours of the night because academics are the first priority.

“I’ve been able to pull together a JV schedule and a junior high. Fortunately with the junior high, the Laurel Highlands had an opening. Bishop Guilfoyle didn’t have enough players to field a junior high ninth grade team,  and the Laurel Highlands asked us if we would be willing to take that spot. That was a blessing.”

Clevenger said the Lions should be set for the next two seasons.

“What the future brings. …hopefully it will be a league or conference affiliation,” Clevenger said.