By: TOM WILLIAMS (Vindy.com) -

Long-time Pittsburgh Pirates fans remember how the struggling baseball team once tried to cover up sparse attendance at Three Rivers Stadium by placing tarps over most of the outfield upper-deck seats.

When state football championship games return to Ohio Stadium in 2014, the Ohio High School Athletic Association plans to utilize a similar concept in an effort to create intimacy in the 105,000-seat facility. That’s because some of the games might have fewer than 10,000 watching.

During Wednesday’s teleconference call to discuss the OHSAA’s plan to split a four-year contract for football championships with Columbus and Stark County, OHSAA commissioner Dan Ross said he believes Columbus backers will come up with a way to make Ohio’s largest stadium less intimidating.

Ross said he attended one of the games of the Kirk Herbstreit Classic that was recently played in Ohio Stadium. He said tarps with advertisements covering end zone seats made a difference.

”From 10 to 10 [yard lines], it was pretty much full,” Ross said of fans in the sideline seats in Ohio Stadium’s lower deck. “You didn’t get the feel that it was an empty cavern.”

Ross said the OHSAA’s decision to award two seasons to each bidder “absolutely no way meant anything negative to Stark County,” adding that both proposals were so strong that a compromise was reached.

“The ability to add Ohio Stadium provides another opportunity … to add another memory and another dream fulfilled for the young people we serve,” Ross said of the Columbus bid.

Ross said the soonest the OHSAA would consider proposals for 2016 and beyond would be in 2015 after Columbus has had a chance to host.

The OHSAA also had received proposals from Cincinnati, Akron, Akron-Kent State, Bowling Green and Toledo. The proposals were whittled down to four and then two……..

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