Jay ready for ACAC

It’s been four years since Jay County has been in a conference.
As the Patriots enter their inaugural season in the Allen County Athletic Conference, the excitement is felt throughout all fall sports teams.
“It’s exciting,” said volleyball coach Fred Medler. “I’ve been excited since I heard we were going into a conference.”
Boys soccer coach Alan Bailey and girls golf coach Butch Gray both said returning to a conference is a good thing because it gives athletes another chance to be recognized for their efforts.
Rather than just relying on how they perform at the sectional level and beyond, players can now compete for ACAC championships and be named to all-conference teams.
Some players, like girls soccer captains Catherine Dunn and Gabbie Mann, say joining a conference gives them the opportunity to play teams they wouldn’t otherwise compete against.
“It helps with exposure,” said Dunn, a senior. “It definitely helps with seeing the different variety of teams that you get to play.”
Getting to the point of returning to a conference, however, was a long process.

Finding a home
Jay County had been looking for a new conference to call home since 2001 when five schools — Hamilton Southeastern, Noblesville, Brownsburg, Harrison and McCutcheon — left the Olympic Athletic Conference for other opportunities. Huntington North left three years later, cutting the OAC down to four schools. When Anderson Highland merged with Anderson in 2010, the conference dissolved.
The North Central Conference began courting Jay County early in the 2012-13 school year. The NCC, which was hoping to expand to 12 teams, invited the Patriots in February 2013. A month later, Jay County was invited to the ACAC.
After much deliberation — including letters to the editor from those in favor and against joining the ACAC — Jay School Board approved superintendent Tim Long’s recommendation that JCHS joined the Allen County Athletic Conference.
From that moment, the scheduling for the 2014-15 school year began.

Prior agreements
With Garrett on the way out of the conference and Jay County on its way in, the Patriots would just take the spot of the Railroaders on the schedule for the other conference schools — Adams Central, South Adams, Woodlan, Southern Wells, Bluffton, Heritage and Leo.
But, some of those schools already had prior agreements to play the Patriots in a handful of sports. Then the uncertainty came down to whether or not Jay County would still play them twice in a season with one of the meetings as a non-conference tilt.
“Those are the questions we’re answering now,” said JCHS athletics director Steve Boozier.
The addition of conference games has created some scheduling conflicts, none of which bigger than the three-game series for football.
For this season, the Patriots will host the Indians in the third week of the Indiana football season, which is the second week for Ohio. But with Leo leaving the conference in 2015 and Southern Wells joining back for football, Jay County’s non-conference open date will move to the eighth week, which is smack in the middle of the Midwest Athletic Conference schedule for the Tribe.
As it stands now, the series between state-line rivals will only be one year, but Boozier said he plans to make it work in the future.
“We’ll play Fort Recovery as soon as we can,” he said. “That’s a high priority for both schools. We’ll make any arrangement we have to be able to play them again.”

Rearranging schedules
By being affiliated with a conference, Boozier said Jay County now has security that it will always have games on its schedule.
“Not every sport is played by every school in the conference,” he said, alluding to the fact there are not enough schools with swim teams or gymnastics teams. “As far as that part of the scheduling goes it just provides some security that we know we have some definitive games.
“It also puts us in the position where we’re not at the mercy of everyone else’s schedule.”
As an independent, the Patriots often had games canceled at the last minute because of a conference conflict with the other school. This year though, Boozier was on the other side of that conversation. He had to make calls to non-ACAC schools and tell them they were getting bumped from the schedule because of a conference game, or settle on another competition date.
Most of those occasions, Boozier added, the ADs were able to work it out.
Rearranging schedules did not go as planned for Boozier, though, when the IHSAA said that boys and girls basketball teams could add two games to their schedule. While teams do not have to play the extra two games, Boozier said he would like to fill those holes.
It may come down to finding a tournament to compete in or throwing one together last minute.
“It’s been challenging but it’s a positive challenge,” Boozier said. “It’s going to be a fluid process this year. We’re excited.”

Conference openers
The girls golf team opened ACAC play in a three-way meet Aug. 12 with Leo and Adams Central, finishing second behind the Lions.
Jay County’s boys and girls soccer teams open their respective conference schedules tonight against Heritage.
The Patriot volleyball team plays Bluffton on Sept. 9, the cross country teams compete against Leo and Woodlan the same day and the football team takes on Adams Central in Monroe three days later.
“We’re going to have our hands full,” Jay County football coach Tim Millspaugh said, noting the familiarity of the Patriots and some of the ACAC schools. Jay County has played Heritage the last three years, faced Leo in 2010 and scrimmaged Adams Central a couple years ago. “This is a very physical conference, it’s a good football conference. We have the chance to play for a conference championship and that’s something we haven’t had.”
Winning that conference championship, however, won’t be an easy task for any Patriot team.
South Adams and Adams Central are defending conference champions respectively in boys cross country and volleyball. Garrett won the conference meet in girls cross country, but Leo had the best record in regular season meets so the two teams shared the title. Leo won the championship in the five remaining fall sports — girls golf, football, boys and girls soccer and tennis.
For the winter sports, Leo, Woodlan and Garrett took the wrestling, boys basketball and girls basketball titles respectively.
Leo won the conference championship in five of the six spring sports, with the only other crown going to Bluffton in boys track.
Millspaugh mentioned he feels other teams in the conference will try harder to beat the Patriots, not only on the gridiron but in every other sport as well.
“I do feel like we have a target on our back simply because we’re the new kid on the block,” he said. “No one wants the new kid on the block to be successful.”