Week one of the Indiana high school football season launched last night, and Friday night – as it pertains to Warsaw Tiger football – began the first of three weeks Fisher Field will be dark.
People will, at first blush, think this will be an on-going thing every other year based on the numerous years’ past where the conference schedule was set solid as well as the setup of non-conference slates.
Worry not.
This year’s three straight road games are a mix of a new conference scheduling pattern and the interim shift of non-conference foes between contracts in place, and placeholder games until some other opponents could lock into home-and-home matchups with Warsaw.
It has been at least 18 months since the Northern Lakes Conference (NLC) – thanks to the efforts of Concord athletic director Dave Preheim – revised conference schedules from 2022 through 2033 to tackle some NLC football issues.
Let’s look at the what before I discuss the why.
The Warsaw Tiger football non-conference schedule normalizes next year with one home and one away game. The Tigers will open by hosting Michigan City August 23, 2024. This will be the final fray with the Wolves among six recent consecutive seasons altogether.
Warren Central, a member of the deep, powerful Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference in the Indianapolis area, will host the Tigers for a home-and-home series in 2024 and 2025.
Fort Wayne Snider (2025) and another MIC member, Ben Davis (2026), are in Warsaw’s home-and-home gridiron future.
As for the three straight weeks of darkness at Fisher Field, there will be no more stretches like this from 2024 through 2033.
Here is how the NLC slate for Warsaw looks in 2024. This host team flips to the guest team in 2025:
Goshen (week 3 - home), Wawasee (week 4 – away), Concord (week 5 – away), Plymouth (week 6 – home), Mishawaka (week 7 – home), Northwood (week 8 – away), and Northridge (week 9 – away)
Each opponent among weeks 3 through 8 will rotate, with week 9’s opponent locked through 2033. We’ll discuss this in the why section.
It seemed like the old NLC schedule before 2022 was going to continue long past most of our lives, but Preheim headed up a group addressing some issues in the NLC warranting a review of the league’s schedule.
Here comes the why.
The legacy NLC schedule posed problems among 4A schools Northridge, NorthWood, Plymouth, and Wawasee where some – but not all – of these schools found themselves playing each other in the first round of sectionals one week after they battled each other in their season finale in more than one past season.
They are all currently in the same sectional (IHSAA Class 4A Sectional 18).
Class 5A schools Concord, Goshen, and Mishawaka would almost always have the same problem with two schools among these three since they are in a four-team sectional (Sectional 10).
If Warsaw is pushed down to Class 5A in the next enrollment classification reset (spring 2024) – a very likely shift when looking at upward trends in enrollment among Valparaiso, Decatur Central and other schools in the Greater Indianapolis area – then they would likely land in the aforementioned Class 5A sectional.
Back to more of the what.
Preheim’s design of schedules through 2033 locks each NLC with the same opponent for the regular season finale, combatants who will not face each other in their initial postseason fray.
Here’s how it looks:
Concord (5A) – Plymouth (4A)
Goshen (5A) – NorthWood (4A)
Mishawaka (5A) – Wawasee (4A)
Northridge (4A) – Warsaw (6A)
There is enough disparity in enrollment among each pairing to assure that unless some huge thriving company sets up a major branch or corporate headquarters in one of the four 4A schools, we’ll have a greater chance of seeing a snowball in Hell than seeing these schools in a rematch in week 10s (for 4A) and 11 (for 5A, and 6A).
There’s even better news, Tiger fans.
2023 will be the last season you’ll have to schlep to Plymouth during the weekend of the Blueberry festival through at least 2033. Free parking, with greater available spots near the Rock Pile are in your sights for ten consecutive seasons following this season’s week three clash, September 1.
I’ll be 70 years old before there is a possibility of a Tiger game coinciding with Plymouth’s biggest weekend.
The cries among fans from Northridge, Mishawaka, Wawasee, Goshen, and Northwood about the week 3 parking experience in Marshal County’s crown jewel will fall upon deaf Warsaw ears. These five schools with week 3 home-and-home spots with Plymouth will experience the struggle only once among the next ten seasons.
Warsaw fans fought the parking challenge every other year among at least the last 30 seasons based on information available from johnharrell.net since 1994. The symphony of tiny violins in the Lake City populous are giving a command performance for the next ten seasons following 2023.
In the meantime, this year’s regular season schedule is no picnic, but the four NLC home games will afford Tiger football fans three tough programs and an archrival homecoming guest who’s tired of being penciled in as an automatic win.