Not that long ago, I caught up with Franklin High School athletic director Brad Sidwell by cellular phone as he was driving back to the area from a visit to Cape Cod. Sidwell is the chairman of the Hockomock League's athletic directors this year, and I asked him how the process of expanding the venerable high school sports league was going.

"I honestly feel that I don't know what's going to happen," he said.

Fast-forward ahead a few weeks to Monday, 11 days shy of the deadline set by the league for applications from interested schools. I reached Sidwell in his office at Franklin High and asked him the same question.

"I still don't know where this is going to go," he replied.

Sidwell wasn't being cagy or deliberately dismissive. He's not kidding when he says that the direction for the future of the Hockomock League is uncertain. Since the league made it known in early April that it would entertain applications for new member schools, with the intention of splitting into large-school and small-school divisions, the revelation has generated a lot of buzz in local sports circles.

There's good reason. The Hockomock, consisting of nine schools in contiguous communities from Canton to the north to North Attleboro to the south, has been one of the most stable school-sports entities in eastern Massachusetts for the past four decades.

Beneath that façade of stability, however, has churned a cauldron of concern over the growing disparity in enrollment figures.

Franklin, where Sidwell is also the football coach, has 1,584 students from grades 9-12 according to the state Department of Education's Web site. Mansfield is second with 1,414 students. Contrast those numbers with Foxboro's 885 and Canton's 791, bringing up the rear, and you'll see why there's concern about the future competitive balance of the league.

The future of Hockomock League football is also playing a big role in this push to find new members, and the enrollment disparity in the male student populations is just as worrisome to the small schools. Franklin and Mansfield again lead the pack with 780 and 753 respectively, while Foxboro and Canton trail with 420 and 371.

"There are a lot of factors other than just enrollment to consider," Sidwell said, "but enrollment is probably the fairest way to compare the situation, and that extends over all sports, not just football."

Since the league opened its doors to potential expansion for the second time since 2002, "there has been a lot of interest," Sidwell said. Confidentiality agreements prevented him from revealing the schools that have applied, but within hours of the announcement at the beginning of April, the athletic directors at Bishop Feehan High School and Milford High School made it clear that they'd want their schools considered. Norton High's administration has also publicly expressed a desire to consider alternatives to its current membership in the Tri-Valley League, and presumably, the lure of a small-school division of the Hockomock League would be hard to resist.

The goal of the league, Sidwell admitted, is to find three new members to bring its current membership to 12. That would allow the Hockomock to split into two divisions of six schools each (large schools and small schools), but all that entails really hasn't been figured out yet.

Would the Hockomock League receive an additional berth in the MIAA football playoffs as a result? Nobody knows.

Would traditional rivalries be preserved in the divisional split? Presumably, but nothing is in writing yet. How would this affect sports other than football? To be determined.

From where will the new members come? The announcement said that "special attention will be pair to interested teams who are demographically compatible with the Hockomock League," and presumably, that includes geographically as well.

Speculation has run rampant for some time about which schools would be good fits in the Hockomock. Usually, Bishop Feehan evokes the most discussion. The proponents say that Feehan's size (roughly 1,000 students), location and competitive level would dovetail well with the Hockomock. The opponents say there's no way that a private Catholic school should be able to draw athletes away from the public schools it competes against on a daily basis.

For years, the objections to Feehan have carried the day when the topic of expansion was raised. But in our initial conversation, Sidwell said that the league was approaching this round with "open-mindedness" about potential new members "when we see exactly how the numbers fit."

Does that indicate a thaw in the league's attitude toward Bishop Feehan? It's hard to tell.

Just as important in the process as a school's size is how it would be perceived to fit in with the other schools.

"We've been a fairly stable group over the years because the principals and the ADs believe in the same things," Sidwell said. "That's why we're going over so many different scenarios about how this would happen and how it will work, and we're not going to leave any stone unturned."

Because the member schools intend to be so deliberate and painstaking in their consideration of the future, no one should expect a bombastic announcement any time soon.

The deadline for interested schools to apply is a week from Friday. League officials will meet a week after that, Sidwell said, but he said it could be well into June before any true consensus is reached, if even then. There are so many issues from within the league that have yet to be addressed, including scheduling, as well as the pending MIAA football realignment anticipated in 2009, that it may not be possible to etch the Hockomock's intentions in stone for quite a while.

It would appear that the response to which Sidwell alluded is more to the Hockomock's liking than it was in 2002. That time, only larger schools applied, which did nothing to address the fears of the smaller schools, so the effort to expand was abandoned. Six years have passed and the disparity continues to grow, which is why there seems to be more seriousness behind the effort to expand this time around.

But there will be no rush to judgment.

"There are so many factors in it, we won't rush to get something done," Sidwell said. "We're willing to take our time in considering this so we can be sure it will be in the best interests of all the schools."

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com.