The Middle Border Conference is one of more than a dozen high school leagues throughout Wisconsin that is slated for realignment in the fall of 2024, according to recent WIAA reports.

Pierce County schools including Prescott and Ellsworth will remain in the Middle Border Conference while Rice Lake shifts back to the Big Rivers. Altoona leaves the Coulee Conference to replace Rice Lake’s now-open slot in the Middle Border starting in August of 2024.

With the approved realignments, the Middle Border Conference will include Ellsworth, Prescott, Altoona, Baldwin-Woodville, Saint Croix Central, Osceola, Amery and Somerset.

The realignment is perhaps the most natural of any in the state. Rice Lake gets its wish to return to the Big Rivers after two years in the Middle Border and Altoona completes its natural transition into one of western Wisconsin’s most historic leagues.

The Altoona Railroaders football team resided in the Cloverbelt Conference for more than a decade before joining the Coulee in 2020.

All of Altoona’s other sports competed in the Cloverbelt West Conference for more than two decades before they transitioned to the Middle Border Conference before the 2021-22 season. With the realignment in 2024, Altoona will have completed its integration into the Middle Border.

For Ellsworth football head coach Rob Heller, seeing the conference altered without harming any of the long-standing rivalries – some of which are among the oldest in the state – is a massive victory for a historically significant Middle Border Conference.

“I’m excited about it because it keeps the Middle Border largely intact, which is something a lot of other conferences are struggling with,” Heller said. “Some of those conferences are losing a lot of rivalry games and traditions. I’m glad to see that the Middle Border is staying intact.”

The realignment also competitively balances the conference. Last season, Rice Lake boasted an enrollment of 711 students, which put the Warriors firmly in Division 3. The seven other programs in the Middle Border were all Division 4, as they had enrollments ranging from 457 (Prescott) to 531 (Ellsworth and Saint Croix Central).

Although Ellsworth won the conference outright last season during Rice Lake’s first year in the league, that was a special Panthers team that returned many players from a roster the year before that played in a state championship game.

Ellsworth and a talented Baldwin-Woodville squad were the only teams that knocked off Rice Lake in conference play last season. Excluding those two games, Rice Lake’s average margin of victory against Middle Border teams was more than 25 points last year.

The Warriors simply pummeled non-elite teams in league play throughout 2022. Coach Heller spoke about how playing Rice Lake isn’t the same experience for every team in the conference.

“We’re a D4 school and the pendulum always swings back; there will come a time where we will be rebuilding,” Heller said. “When we’re clicking it’s fun to play Rice Lake. But if you’re on a down year, that’s a different kind of animal. I just think it suits everyone in the conference better (with the realignment changes).”

For Prescott head coach Jordan Hansen, seeing the Warriors leave and the Railroaders enter is a common sense solution to one of the league’s biggest problems.

Since Rice Lake joined last year it has regularly advocated for a return to the Big Rivers Conference while Altoona spent last season expressing its desire to join the Middle Border with the rest of its athletics teams.

“Altoona wanted in because they’re in for everything else, so it makes sense to get them into the Middle Border,” Hansen said. “Rice Lake wanted to go back to the Big Rivers because they feel like with their enrollment and what they’ve done there in the past, they should be there. Both schools wanted it and they’re both going to get their wish.”

For both Hansen and Heller, the biggest success of the league’s realignment is that none of the traditional rivalries have been impacted. For Pierce county, Ellsworth and Prescott’s annual Highway 10 rivalry remains untouched.

“If you look at our attendance, and I’m sure if you look at Ellsworth’s, we bring in quite a few more people for our big rivalry game just being down the road,” Hansen said. “People get excited, the towns get excited and it’s great to be a part of. If we lost that, it would be tough on the communities.”

While the 2024 realignments likely solidified the Middle Border Conference for the next half-decade, enrollments will continue to change and the WIAA will almost certainly continue to analyze potential conference adjustments.

Heller believes that it’s not necessarily the Big Rivers schools that fans should be keeping an eye on. Instead, it should be the Heart O’North, which is home to six Division 5 schools that could fall to Division 6 with potentially declining enrollments.

That would create a need for somewhat larger schools to move into the Heart O’North, some of which could potentially be found in the Middle Border Conference. Heller spoke about that league impacting western Wisconsin’s football landscape.

“Another conference that doesn’t get talked about is the Heart O’North,” Heller said. “A lot of those teams are changing sizes. Are they going to pull a declining school in our league? Then we’d have to look at bringing in (Big Rivers) schools. We’ve got to be ready to adjust on the fly.”

While conference realignment is an issue that certainly isn’t going away anytime soon, it appears as if the Middle Border Conference is set for the next half-decade with the adjustments slated for the fall of 2024.