State of the athletic department: Greenwood

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series taking stock of where each of Johnson County’s high school athletic departments stand heading into the 2023-24 school year. Today we take a look at Greenwood, which could see both costs and benefits in the future as a result of its caught-in-the-middle enrollment numbers.

Mike Campbell has been around long enough to remember when Hamilton Southeastern was a small Class 2A school. Some 30 or 40 years later, it’s morphed into two of the state’s largest schools.

So when the second-year Greenwood athletic director says that his school will eventually be smaller than Indian Creek, it doesn’t sound at all far-fetched. Given their boxed-in district boundaries and the rapid growth of their conference and county neighbors, the Woodmen are likely facing a changing landscape in the years to come.

The only question is how quickly it will change.

Last month, the IHSAA answered that question in part when it announced adjustments to its reclassification system that will take effect starting in the fall of 2024. When they do, Greenwood is looking at a likely move down from Class 4A to 3A in basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball.

That should make a big difference for a school that hasn’t won a softball sectional since 1988, a baseball sectional since 1984 or a volleyball sectional in … well, ever. The Woodmen did win a boys basketball sectional in 2020, but a move to Class 3A should help them be more consistently competitive since they won’t be playing schools nearly twice their size.

“Anytime you go to the top end of the class size-wise, it makes your jobs more attractive. It’ll give you a competitive advantage just from a sheer numbers standpoint, and that affects everything but football,” Campbell said. “I think it makes where we’re at very attractive.”

Greenwood still faces a size gap within the Mid-State Conference, where its 2022-23 enrollment of 1,219 students puts it at the bottom of the league and well behind the likes of Perry Meridian (2,371) and Whiteland (2,012 and growing rapidly).

Campbell acknowledges that he may end up needing to find a new home eventually if the Woodmen become much smaller than their conference peers, but says a change is not on the short-term radar.

“If the right conference came and said, ‘Hey, we want you to be a member,’ we certainly could look at that,” he said, “but right now, it’s not one of those things where — we’re not awaiting membership for a conference.”

For now, one of the top priorities for Greenwood is to keep enrollment stable by holding onto its own athletes. In recent years, it’s had to fight against losing kids to the likes of Center Grove, Roncalli and Indianapolis Lutheran — but Campbell is encouraged by how his coaches fared with the incoming freshman class.

“That’s been, as we’ve hired new coaches, an emphasis we’ve made to get coaches in the elementary school, to not only recruit kids in the elementary school, but to retain them in middle school,” Campbell said. “That’s been a huge push for us. We have a pretty talented eighth-grade class coming over, and we retained all of those kids, and that’s a credit to what our head coaches have done. Getting their face in front of those kids, developing relationships, that’s huge.”

Retention is particularly important at Greenwood because its enrollment numbers require leaning more heavily on multi-sport athletes than most 4A schools do. Basketball and baseball coaches can’t balk at sharing time with football, because in several cases the team’s best players overlap.

“We can’t say, ‘Oh, we’re going to have our core 40 for football’ or we’re going to have our core 20 for baseball or we’re going to have our core 12 for basketball,” Campbell said. “Our best athletes have to play multiple sports.”

Getting some more stability within the coaching ranks should help with keeping those top athletes in green uniforms. Since taking the AD reins less than a year ago, Campbell has already had to not only hire his own successor in football but also deal with in-season coaching changes in both softball and volleyball. On top of that, he had to hire two new varsity basketball coaches this summer.

Despite the chaotic start to his tenure, Campbell feels good about where things stand heading into the 2023-24 school year. He’s excited about new football coach Justin Boser, who comes in after doing an admirable five-year rebuild at Clarksville, and he feels like the Woodmen got a steal in new girls basketball coach Jenny Finora.

Greenwood has also made some notable upgrades to its athletic facilities, adding lights to its tennis courts and baseball and softball fields this spring, constructing a new soccer-only stadium in front of the school and installing new gray field turf on the football field.

Campbell is excited about how that new look will translate on Friday nights this fall.

“It’s unbelievably cool,” he said. “We’ve had the lights on. It’s cool.”

Having had a few months now to get his feet wet and now being able to start the year focused on the athletic director role full-time — he was still coaching and teaching when he took the job last fall — Campbell feels far more comfortable in his still somewhat new shoes, and he’s optimistic about Greenwood’s future despite any of the potential challenges ahead.

“I like where we’re at, I like where we’re going,” he said. “I like our direction. I think we’ve had a nice culture shift to keep moving forward, and we have a good understanding of what we are and who we are and what our purpose is — to put out as many quality young people as we can.”