True - I was thinking about their girls basketball, which is 3A, but forgot girls have the extra class in some of those sports.
Albia 279, Chariton 293, Centerville 301, Clarke 311 plus knoxville is getting smaller. Also a member before Cardinal chose to join.
Knoxville was in the SCC until around 1997/98, when they left for Little Hawkeye. They came back in 2014. Cardinal joined a couple of years ago, and they openly wanted to join.
Hawkeye 10 got that beat. LC at 747. Next closest is Denison around 600, a mid 400 school, a few in the 300s, and the rest in the 200s all the way down to Shenandoah at 222. I guess St. Alberts is also a part of the conference and they are only listed at 125.
Lol, knoxville’s BEDS number is 25 less than in 2014 when all those schools approved their membership. You’re going to be super pissed when they let in oskaloosa in a couple of years when they flee Little Hawkeye.
Lots of Knoxville students open enrolling to Pleasantville. Have a relative who works at Pleasantville and they said enrollment there will be more than 50 ahead of last year. Pleadantville is also getting people from SE Polk they said. Pella Christian wants to go to the SCC but the schools don’t want them.
Was a huge mistake by Cardinal to move to the SCC, they are by far the smallest school and did it when they were rolling through a couple of classes of decent boy athletes. Their softball team did win the conference this past year, but the rest of their sports finished at the bottom. Great for travel but hard on the coaches at Cardinal to get kids out and interested in the sport. Last time I asked someone that was teaching there Cardinal was getting around 200 students open enrolled out of Ottumwa.
And quite a few from Fairfield. See the cars of parents parked near 163 on the border with Ottumwa and the border with Fairfield. I think it was a big mistake for Cardinal to join. Would rather see a school like Van Buren which does pretty well against SCC teams in a few sports.
VB would be in an even worst shape than Cardinal numbers wise, Cardinals BEDS is 210 for the 3 grades while VB is at 164 for the same group. VB has had a much better athletic history in every sport than softball than Cardinal, but most of that success was in the past. Cardinal's problem is most of the kids they are getting out of the district are not athletes except for the few that the parents went to Cardinal and have moved to the Ottumwa district.
I would say you graduated in the late 1980s and before the super conference was formed. Had Bob Gerard as one of your coaches, my he rest in peace.
Having a conference where the largest school has a BEDS that is 2x that of the smallest isn’t an outlier. There’s a lot bigger spread in conferences all over. Even the CIML has a much bigger spread. It’s that or making travel worse.
Early 80s, but yeah. Coach Gerard led us to a 7-2 season in 1980, but in those days you almost had to go undefeated or 8-1 to make the playoffs.
I’m not familiar with that part of the state, but it seems like it’s at the point that the associations need to blow it all up and do districts every couple of years and apply them to all sports. Then if schools want to schedule local traditional rivals across classes they can do it in the non-con.
