West Aurora leaving Upstate Eight for Southwest Prairie

Struggling to find enough games for its lower level teams to play, West Aurora has decided to leave the Upstate Eight Conference and join the Southwest Prairie.

The move became official at a school board meeting Tuesday night. The Blackhawks will start play in the SPC next year.

"Our biggest thing is levels," West Aurora athletic director Jason Buckley said. "We're really struggling to find games for a lot of our lower levels in our conference. We need to ensure we have games for them to play. A lot of times people see these conference moves about one sport or another and it's not. It's really something we're finding ourselves in a situation across many sports where the teams in the Upstate Eight aren't able to field some of the levels we need to field and it's been quite frustrating. We need to go out and get other games."

For example, in the first two weeks of the football season, West Aurora has not played a sophomore game either week before the varsity game. In Week 1 West Aurora played a freshman game before its varsity game against Larkin. This week West Aurora will do the same thing against Streamwood.

Last week the Blackhawks did play a sophomore game but that was at Marmion while the varsity played at West Chicago.

And it's not just football, said Buckley.

"That's just one of the examples," Buckley said. "We've run into this in a lot of the sports. Softball, volleyball, wrestling, across the board. A lot of the schools aren't fielding the numbers. We show up with close to 100 kids and another school might have 20 in their whole program. It just makes it difficult for us because we've got great participation among our student-athletes and we want that to continue. And if we're not able to field those levels and give them contests to play they are not going to continue to go out. And I can't blame them all if they didn't. We want to keep kids involved and we feel this is best opportunity to do this."

West Aurora left the DuPage Valley Conference and joined the Upstate Eight for the 2014-15 school year. The Blackhawks are joined in the UEC by Elgin, Larkin, East Aurora, Streamwood, Bartlett, West Chicago, South Elgin, Glenbard East and first-year member Glenbard South.

In moving to the Southwest Prairie, the Blackhawks will also benefit from being closer to a majority of the schools: Oswego East, Oswego, Plainfield South, Joliet Central, Plainfield Central, Plainfield East, Plainfield North, Joliet West, Minooka, Yorkville and Romeoville.

Buckley said nothing is official yet but he believes West Aurora will be grouped in a division with Yorkville, Oswego East, Oswego, Plainfield North and either Plainfield East or Minooka.

"Those absolutely matter," Buckley said of the driving distances. "We want to make sure we weren't driving ungodly distances to play these contests. Really the SPC was a perfect fit for us. On a whole it's closer. We're getting into a better geographical situation as well."