Big Northern hits reset button

Updated: July 19, 2011 7:24PM

Big changes are on the way in the Big Northern Conference.

When Hampshire announced it was leaving the league following the most recent school year for the Fox Valley Conference, it helped set in motion a chain of events that will lead to three new schools joining the BNC during the next two years.

The new additions to the league are Rock Falls, Mendota and Rockford Christian, and their arrivals will alter the landscape in the BNC as it goes from a 12-team conference to one with 14 member schools.

The BNC will continue to split into an East Division and West Division, and the inclusion of the three newcomers will be spread out over the next two years.

Starting this fall, Rock Falls will move into the league in all sports while Mendota will join the BNC in every sport but football. The new conference format will be finalized at the start of the 2012-13 school year when Rockford Christian joins in every sport and Mendota’s football team comes aboard as a BNC member.

“I think this solidifies the conference now that we’re going to have 14 schools,” Burlington Central athletic director Steve Gertz said. “This just makes scheduling easier and traveling easier for both divisions. Our No. 1 goal is to keep the conference alive and strong and to support both divisions.”

One of the changes taking effect this fall involves Genoa-Kingston moving from the BNC West to the BNC East, taking Hampshire’s place in the division.

G-K joins BNC East holdovers Burlington Central, Harvard, Marengo, North Boone and Richmond-Burton. Rockford Christian will then enter the BNC East the following year, giving the division seven schools.

“We’re excited about going to the East,” G-K athletic director Dirk Campbell said. “It’s going to present some challenges obviously. We go from being the biggest school in the West to the second smallest school in the East. We’ve got some work to do, but we’re looking forward to it.”

Meanwhile, Rock Falls and Mendota will enter the BNC West, joining holdovers Byron, Oregon, Rockford Lutheran, Stillman Valley and Winnebago.

The overhaul of the conference will lead to a change in the way conference crossover games are scheduled.

In football, teams will now play six division games as opposed to the old five-game division schedule. In order to maintain two BNC crossover games, all of the conference teams will go from playing two nonconference games at the start of the year to only playing one.

In all sports but football, teams will only be scheduled to play one crossover game against opponents from the other division. That is a departure from the past, when two or three BNC crossover games were played depending on the sport.

The reduction in crossover games between the two divisions in all sports but football means G-K will have a harder time maintaining some of the rivalries it built with its former BNC West counterparts.

“We will miss some of the rivalries we have established with schools in the West, although I’m doing everything I can to make sure we continue playing them in some way,” Campbell said. “Our fear was that if we don’t continue to play each other in crossover or nonconference games we’re basically splitting into two conferences, and we don’t want that to happen.”

Mendota and Rock Falls come to the BNC from the North Central Illinois Conference, which dissolved after the 2010-11 school year following 82 years of existence. Rockford Christian will move to the BNC from the Northeast Athletic Conference next year.

Burlington Central will remain the biggest school in the BNC with an enrollment of 1,059 students, which is more than 200 students larger than Richmond-Burton, the league’s second biggest school.

Despite that gap, it appears Burlington Central is staying put in the BNC and not looking for a way to crack into a different league such as the newly formed Northern Illinois Big 12 Conference, which includes nearby Kaneland and Sycamore, both of which have enrollments similar to Burlington Central’s.

“We like the conference a lot and we have no intention of leaving,” Gertz said. “We enjoy the competition and rivalries we have in the league.”

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