Greenwood boys basketball coach Keith Witty talks to his team before the start of a game this season, which will likely be the last for the Woodmen as a Class 4A team.
Daily Journal file photo
Greenwood’s enrollment hasn’t changed a whole lot over the last few years, but its place on the landscape of Indiana high school sports is about to shift significantly.
The combination of a new classification system approved by the IHSAA last June and the statewide enrollment numbers released by the organization earlier this week make what had been suspected as a possibility into a near certainty — come August, the Woodmen will be moving to Class 3A in all class sports except for football.
The eighty-one largest schools — 20% of the 407 member institutions — will make up Class 4A in each of those sports, down from the 25% currently slotted into that top grouping. Ranked 82nd in enrollment, Greenwood projects to be the largest 3A school instead of one of the smallest in 4A before taking into account upward shifts due to tournament success factor and the like.
Woodmen athletic director Mike Campbell isn’t planning any radical changes until the IHSAA officially announces its new classifications for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, but he says any realignment would precipitate some scheduling tweaks for most of his teams.
“Obviously, our sectional alignments will be completely different than what we’ve had in the past,” Campbell said. “We’ll have to look in the future, how do we schedule some sectional opponents. Our basketball coaches, baseball coaches, they like to see sectional teams, volleyball likes to see sectional teams. …
“It’ll take a couple of years with contracts and schedules; we’re not at the collegiate level where we just move the schedule around on a whim or things like that. We try and keep our schedules out as long as possible, just so we have full schedules. We keep in mind back-to-back dates, types of teams we’re playing, where we’re playing, so there’s a lot that goes into that piece.”
While some alterations would be made to get new sectional opponents onto the schedules, Campbell made it clear that a shift to Class 3A would not push the Woodmen to search for a new conference home. At 1,211 students, Greenwood is the smallest school in the Mid-State Conference; the next smallest in the league, Martinsville (75th with 1,315 students) and Mooresville (68th with 1,398), are both still solidly nestled in 4A. Yet Greenwood plans to stay put and compete against those larger schools for the foreseeable future.
“If 3A gives us more opportunity for tournament success, playing high-level competition isn’t a bad thing at all,” Campbell said. “We have a great conference, we have great schools, great competition.”
Greenwood is one of more than a dozen schools expected to drop down into 3A for the next two school years. That group also includes Roncalli, whose 1,092 students rank it 92nd in enrollment.
Roncalli AD David Lauck says that the Royals’ girls and boys basketball teams will accept the move to Class 3A and stay there. A decision has not been made yet about whether Roncalli’s volleyball, baseball and softball teams will opt to continue competing up in Class 4A or also drop down.
Any schools choosing to move up in class (or forced up due to success factor) would push Greenwood further off the dividing line and more solidly into 3A; Cathedral, ranked 94th, is widely expected to opt up, and others may choose to do the same. Still, Campbell knows that his school is close enough to the edge that it can’t make too many long-term alterations just yet.
“We know every two years those can fluctuate,” he said, “and we also know that we’re on that verge between 3A and 4A, so we’re not going to do a wholesale change on everything.”
Moving to Class 3A would potentially come with a built-in rivalry — Indian Creek, currently the lone 3A school in Johnson County, looms as a potential, if not likely, sectional opponent for the Woodmen.
The two schools already face one another in every sport as is, whether in county tournaments or in regular-season competition.
“I have always thought that’s been a good rivalry, a county game,” Campbell said. “We’re usually closer numbers-wise in enrollment to Indian Creek than we are to Whiteland, or even — we’re not even close with Center Grove. … We take that game very seriously. It’s a big deal for our kids to play Indian Creek kids; they’re at C-9 with them, they see them around at the fair, things like that, so it’s always been a great rivalry. We play them in everything. It’s been a great series for us.”
Having more opportunities to play against the Braves, especially in the postseason, should only serve to bolster that rivalry. As for the other ramifications that might come with a change in class, Campbell doesn’t believe those have really come up in conversations much among Greenwood athletes and coaches.
They’re more focused on the here and now, with boys swimming and diving sectionals wrapping up today and the boys basketball postseason a little more than a week away.
Once the change becomes official, though, the buzz should pick up.
“I don’t know if our kids have really thought too much about it,” Campbell said, “because we haven’t put all our eggs in, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to be 3A’ or we’ve got to be this. We haven’t had a ton of discussion until the IHSAA says, ‘Here’s the sectional you’re assigned to.’ That’s when it’ll really kind of spark a conversation.”
With the enrollment numbers out there, it’s probably worth getting the conversation started.
BY THE NUMBERS
Where Johnson County schools sit enrollment-wise heading into IHSAA reclassification for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years:
School;Enrollment;Rank;Class*
Center Grove;2,893;16;4A
Whiteland;2,074;33;4A
Franklin;1,590;54;4A
Greenwood;1,211;82;3A
Indian Creek;636;155;3A
Edinburgh;227;349;A
Greenwood Christian;222;352;A
* – Likely classification for non-football sports; the IHSAA has not yet officially released new classifications for each sport
