Whiteland football would face even more difficult competition in an expanded Mid-State Conference, something that would prove beneficial as it gets set to move up to Class 6A.
Daily Journal file photo
And they all … fall … down.
Dominoes, that is.
Folks in Indiana generally aren’t big fans of change, no matter how big or small. But life is full of change, whether we like it or not. Speculation has picked up recently about Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference charter members Center Grove and Carmel soon leaving that league to join the Hoosier Crossroads Conference — and should that happen, it would likely not be the last seismic change involving Johnson County high school athletics.
This county is undergoing rapid — and uneven — population growth, with enrollment at Whiteland rising too quickly to keep up with while Greenwood and its boxed-in district borders remain stagnant. The IHSAA’s last enrollment numbers, compiled in 2019 and thus already obsolete, had a huge gap between the largest schools in the Mid-State Conference and the smallest.
Perry Meridian, at 2,445 students, ranked as the 18th-largest school in the state, right behind Center Grove. Whiteland (1,916) and Decatur Central (1,845) were two of the larger Class 5A football schools. At the other end of the league’s spectrum, Greenwood had just 1,246 students, with Mooresville (1,372) and Martinsville (1,435) not too far ahead.
As unbalanced as those numbers were, they’re only going to get worse. Whiteland continues to grow at an alarming rate; enrollment there has now gone above 2,000, and it’s not a stretch to project that it’ll become the county’s largest high school within the next 10 years. The Warriors will soon join Perry Meridian as a Class 6A football program, and while plans haven’t been formally approved yet, word is that the district is planning an expansion of facilities accordingly.
How can a league maintain competitive balance when the gap between the biggest and smallest student bodies is getting so large?
By undergoing a massive transformation — which, fortunately, I have a splendid plan for. Glad you asked.
Check it out:
• The MIC would likely seek out a couple of new members to make up for the exit of Center Grove and Carmel. It could hit up the HCC member schools who are against the addition of the Trojans and Greyhounds (and I’ve heard there are a couple of dissenters), or it could court a couple of area schools with similar demographic profiles and athletic strengths. Decatur Central, for example, would be a prime candidate. Let’s start with the not-too-crazy assumption that the Hawks jump at a hypothetical MIC invitation, leaving the Mid-State with seven schools of wildly varied enrollments.
• So now the Mid-State starts thinking expansion. Where to look? The first target would likely be Conference Indiana, which has a number of similarly-sized schools in south-central Indiana but makes no geographic sense whatsoever as currently constituted. Wouldn’t Columbus North and Southport rather take road trips to Whiteland and Franklin than to Terre Haute? One would think so. Heck, the two Bloomington schools already play regular-season games against several Mid-State teams — so let’s add them into the mix too.
If you’re keeping score at home, that would leave the Mid-State with 11 schools: Bloomington North, Bloomington South, Columbus North, Franklin, Greenwood, Martinsville, Mooresville, Perry Meridian, Plainfield, Southport and Whiteland. A good-sized league full of competitive programs, but still one with too big a gap between the biggest and smallest. So…
• We create two divisions — large and small school. But … if we make divisions of six and five, it’s going to leave Plainfield and Franklin, currently the two most successful all-sports athletic departments in the league, in the smaller division when they clearly belong up top. But if we create an eight-team large school division to include the Quakers and Grizzly Cubs, then we have to expand the league a bit more to balance the two divisions out …
• To get to 16 schools, we’d need five more. Which additions would make the most sense?
From a geographic and enrollment standpoint, the first ones that jump out to me would be Columbus East (enrollment 1,475), Greenfield-Central (1,453), Mt. Vernon (1,322), New Palestine (1,175) and Shelbyville (1,164). All reasonably close geographically, with plenty of natural rivalries already built in. These are all opponents that current Mid-State teams schedule with great regularity, and most have a recent history of athletic successes — Columbus East, Mt. Vernon and New Pal have all won state football titles in the last five years.
After all of the shifting and additioning, you’d have a newly expanded Mid-State that looked like this:
Large school division (8): Franklin, Whiteland, Bloomington North, Bloomington South, Columbus North, Perry Meridian, Plainfield, Southport, Whiteland
Small school division (8): Greenwood, Columbus East, Greenfield-Central, Martinsville, Mooresville, Mt. Vernon, New Palestine, Shelbyville
For football, you’d have seven division games with the option of scheduling out-of-division rivals; Greenwood could still play Franklin and/or Whiteland if it so chooses, Columbus East could still face Columbus North, and so on. In basketball and most other sports, you could play seven division games and anywhere from three to five crossovers.
If a school decides it wants to move up or down a division as enrollments or competitive balances change, there’s room to do that. Heck, you could even adjust divisional alignments sport by sport based on strengths. But those 16 schools would make up a pretty strong unit overall.
I feel like that’d be an appealing option for all of the schools involved. It sure as heck beats the prospect of Greenwood or Whiteland leaving the Mid-State for something that involves much longer bus rides and forced “rivalries.”
Besides, it’s not like the Mid-State is a stranger to realignment. Center Grove was a member of the league for a quarter of a century once upon a time; ditto for Brownsburg and Avon at different times. The league hasn’t survived since 1942 by sitting still. A bold, forward-thinking move like this one could set it up for another generation of success — and prevent other conferences from forcing it to play a weaker hand later on.
Sometimes change is necessary to ensure continued relevance.
So…who says no?
