Next year’s 2024-2025 football season is going to look a little different due to a recent decision to merge football conferences in order to create a schedule. Currently Neuqua is in the DuPage Valley Conference (DVC) with Waubounsie, Metea, Naperville North, Naperville Central, and DeKalb. The plan is to merge conferences with the Southwest Suburban conference, which is nine teams. In order to qualify for playoffs, each team must play nine games. However, there are only five teams in our current conference. This makes it extremely difficult to find teams in other conferences that are willing to play, due to Neuqua’s successful football program.
Teams do not want to schedule a game that could possibly give them a loss, so many opt for an easier opponent to add to their wins. Therefore, Neuqua, and many other schools in our conference, are forced to travel out of state in order to fulfill the game number requirements. Although out of state games are a great developmental opportunity due to the competition level, it is just too costly. In addition, the community cannot follow the team to all these different places, so the student section is essentially nonexistent.
The merged conference will be broken down into three divisions determined by total student enrollment of the school and the success rate of the team over the past two years. This makes it much easier to schedule games, as each division plays the four other teams in their division plus the other teams within the conference. Instead of having to spend months trying to coordinate games with teams in completely different states, the teams are essentially guaranteed these nine games in-state.
The only unfortunate part of this decision is that we will not be able to play some of the teams that have been in the DVC, because of the way it is broken down. For example, Waubounsie is not on the schedule for next season as of right now. However, nothing is confirmed yet. Most of the details on the whole situation are still up in the air.
Also, the divisions are reconsidered every two years based on changes in success rates. So there is definitely a possibility that we will get our rivalry games again in the future. Right now, Neuqua is in the top division. During the season, we play all four teams in our division, two in the middle, and one at the bottom. The games with other divisions are randomly drawn, so we have no control over which teams we do and do not get to play. The other two games that are necessary to meet the nine game requirement are scheduled with Minooka and Oswego, as we have a two year contract with them, and there is still one year left on it.
With so many unknowns for next year’s football season, the players and coaches are just trying to focus on this season at hand and live in the moment. After all, we are still the DVC.
