Talks could affect JCHS

A game of conference musical chairs that could affect Jay County High School has already begun.
Earlier this year the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference voted Terre Haute North and Terre Haute South out of its group, and then in November voted to accept Lawrence Central and Pike as replacements. The new MIC teams came from Conference Indiana, which is now left with six members.
The result is uncertainty among Indianapolis-area schools and conferences as to who wills tay, who might leave and how stable each group is heading into the future. There has also been talk of an impending shake-up among conferences around Fort Wayne, although there has not been any official movement in that area as of yet.
On the day before Thanksgiving, the Journal and Courier reported Lafayette schools Harrison, Jefferson and McCutcheon had begun informal discussions with the North Central Conference about the possibility of expansion. Jay County officials have had similar talks with administrators from schools in the NCC, which includes Muncie Central, New Castle, Richmond, Marion, Huntington North, Anderson Kokomo and Logansport.
While the North Central Conference has not begun a formal application process for possible new members, Anderson principal and NCC president Lucinda McCord has confirmed expansion is a possibility.
“We have on and off talked about (expansion) for the last two or three years, just because of the changing nature of the conferences around us,” McCord told the Journal and Courier. “This year we decided to be a little more serious as far as anyone wanting to come into the conference.”
The NCC has long been considered a possible landing place for Jay County, which has been in conference purgatory for more than a decade.
The Patriots were once part of an Olympic Athletic Conference that included McCutcheon and Harrison before they, along with Brownsburg, Noblesville and Hamilton Southeastern, bolted for the Hoosier Crossroads Conference in 1999. That left the OAC at five teams, and a few years later Huntington North left to join the NCC. The conference died in 2010 when Anderson Highland and Anderson merged into a single school.
As has been the case since the OAC began to crumble, Jay County will look at any conference possibility that becomes available.
“We’d have to investigate any possible issue like that,” said JCHS principal and former athletics director Phil Ford, noting that a key factor that makes the Patriots attractive to conferences is its tremendous fan following.
“We don’t want to pass up an opportunity for our school, but we don’t want to be like what you’ve got going on at the college level right now  … What we’re trying to look for in a conference affiliation is something that can be long term, something that can be good for our fans, good for our athletes.”
Ford and JCHS athletics director Bob Lutton said they will consider a variety of issues when exploring any potential conference affiliation, including competitive balance, scheduling and travel. Ford noted that he feels the 10-team version of the OAC was not a good fit for the Patriots because of long weekday trips for games in Lafayette and suburban Indianapolis.
Jay County competes against seven NCC schools in girls basketball, five in gymnastics, three in swimming and two in boys basketball during the winter season. It’s enrollment of about 1,100 students makes it smaller than every school currently in the conference with the exception of Muncie Central while the largest in the group — Kokomo and Huntington North — have about 2,000 students.
Is the NCC a possible destination for Jay County? Yes.
But it’s far too early in the process to know how serious the NCC is about expanding, how such an expansion would be structured and if such a move would be the right one for the Patriots.
“I don’t want to get hopes up too high, because you never know what they’re going to end up doing,” said Lutton. “I think so much of it depends on the big conferences down in Indy. … There are so many rumors out there flying, and once you get a couple of them to go … it just snowballs.”[[In-content Ad]]