Drew Glentzer (center) and his Indian Creek boys basketball squads will have a new conference home in 2025-26.
Daily Journal file photo
The seemingly interminable bus rides to Sullivan, Terre Haute and Brazil will soon be a thing of the past.
Indian Creek’s ninth year in the Western Indiana Conference will be its last, as the Braves prepare to join a fledgling six-team league with Beech Grove, Monrovia, Speedway, Tri-West and Triton Central. Originally planned for a 2026-27 debut, the new conference will instead get up and running at the outset of the 2025-26 school year.
Making the move, Creek athletic director Derek Perry said, was a “no-brainer.”
“I don’t know if there’s a better 3A or smaller school conference out there,” he said.
The dominoes in this latest realignment started to fall with the breakup of the current Sagamore Conference. Crawfordsville, Frankfort, North Montgomery, Southmont and Western Boone departed that league at the end of the 2023-24 school year to join a new league with North Putnam, another WIC émigré. Those schools will be joined in 2025-26 by Cascade and Greencastle and become the Monon Athletic Conference.
That shakeup left Tri-West, one of three remaining Sagamore members along with Danville and Lebanon, searching for a new home. Bruins athletic director Scott Knapp, who previously served in the same role at Center Grove, said his school’s bid to join the Indiana Crossroads Conference was denied — but four schools from that league (Beech Grove, Monrovia, Speedway and Triton Central) broke away shortly thereafter and subsequently invited both Tri-West and Indian Creek to join them.
“It all just kind of fell together at the right time in a pretty quick way,” Knapp said.
Getting out of the WIC should certainly help lower Indian Creek’s travel expenses, if nothing else. Its longest road trip in the new league will be to Tri-West, an hour-long trip that covers 52 miles. By contrast, the Braves’ conference schedule currently includes regular journeys to Northview (72 miles), West Vigo (88) and Sullivan (96).
Perry says that he expects to keep some of the more proximate WIC schools on its nonconference schedules, but those longer trips will largely be eliminated.
While both Perry and Knapp said that the new yet-to-be-named conference would love to eventually get its membership up to eight, it’s comfortable getting started with six and waiting on the right expansion matches as more realignment shakes the central Indiana landscape over the coming months. (Greenwood was rumored as a possible candidate over the summer, but Woodmen AD Mike Campbell says he has had no such conversations.)
Whenever the expansion does take place, Perry expects the current sextet to have plenty of interested parties.
“I think it’s an attractive conference,” he said. “I mean, holy cow, for facilities — I know Speedway’s doing some upgrades on their facilities, Tri-West has nice facilities, we do, Beech Grove, Monrovia.”
From Knapp’s side, he’s excited about starting up a new conference rivalry with a former Johnson County neighbor.
“They’re probably our furthest school,” Knapp said of Indian Creek, “but we’re excited to play them just because of the competitive level that they’ll bring. Our communities are eerily similar; our school makeup is eerily similar. And in fact, you could say that about Monrovia and Triton Central as well. We all have the same clientele and the same size and the same competitiveness — so it just makes sense, to be honest with you.”
Something that’s been long overdue for the Braves.
