By TOM WILLIAMS

williams@vindy.com

COLUMBUS

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.

The news could have been worse for Stark County, which has hosted the state championships since 1990. Ross said an OHSAA vote on the Stark County proposal came up one vote short of passing.

A vote on the compromise was passed on Wednesday by an 8-3 margin.

The new contract begins with the 2012 season when Stark County’s Massillon Paul Brown Tiger Stadium and Canton’s Fawcett Stadium continue to be hosts with three games apiece. (Each site has the early and late games on one day, and the middle game on the other.)

Ohio Stadium will be the site for 2014 and 2015, with the Ohio State Buckeyes’ home hosting three games per day during championship weekend.

Ross said those games will have starting times of 10 a.m., 3 p.m., and 8 p.m.

“That would encompass plenty of opportunity for youngsters to savor their victory [on the field] and still give plenty of time for the next teams to prepare,” Ross said.

Ross said that Ohio Stadium’s turf field eliminates problems with inclement weather that created “issues we had when we had games there in the ‘80s.”

Having the games in a more central location was a factor, Ross said. For years, schools in the southern part of the state have complained about the travel to Northeast Ohio.

Despite smaller stadiums, Stark County has the OHSAA attendance record (65,663 fans in 2001) as well as the next four runners-up (2002, 1997, 2003 and 1999).