The shifting tectonic plates of conference realignment have caused another quake in Johnson County.
Greenwood Christian will be a part of the Indiana Crossroads Conference beginning in July 2025, joining Cardinal Ritter, Covenant Christian, Heritage Christian, Indianapolis Lutheran and Scecina in a group that will feature many of the top small private schools in the Indy metro area.
The ICC is losing Beech Grove, Monrovia, Speedway and Triton Central to the newly formed Hoosier Legends Conference, which will also include Indian Creek and Tri-West. GCA and Heritage are the new additions, leaving the league with six teams instead of eight a year from now.
“When we heard about the dismantling of what was the Crossroads, our plan was to reach out to them, but they reached out to me before I reached out to them,” GCA athletic director Shon Cottle said. “We heard the rumblings before it was official, so I was waiting for the official announcement came out, and they pretty much immediately reached out to us.”
The move puts the Cougars in a football conference for the first time — and it throws the school’s third-year program right into the deep end. Indy Lutheran won three straight Class A state championships (2021-23) before being bumped up to 2A this year, and Covenant was the champion just before that in 2020.
Cottle has concerns about how GCA will fare in football early on, but he likes how the ICC shapes up overall.
“It’s going to be tough. We’re going to have to up our game across the board, but that was part of the reason for actually deciding to do it,” he said. “The entire conference is going to be great competition across the board.”
The Cougars have competed in the Pioneer Academic Athletic Conference since its inception in 2009, but the geographic spread — with teams in Anderson, Brownsburg, Carmel, Muncie and Richmond as well as Indianapolis — proved to be too inconvenient.
Additionally, Cottle believes that Indy Lutheran has emerged as a bigger rival for GCA than any of the PAAC schools anyway.
“I honestly don’t know that most of our people here truly even understood or knew who our conference was,” he said. “It hadn’t been made a big enough deal.”
Cottle does plan to continue playing current PAAC rival Park Tudor in most sports and hopes to maintain nonconference relationships with Bethesda Christian as well, but sees the new ICC as a better fit. The Cougars already schedule Lutheran and Covenant Christian regularly and have faced Ritter in the past.
In all, more than two dozen high schools across Indiana will be part of realigned or completely new conferences by next fall.
