Mahomet-Seymour High School needs a new athletic conference.
As the village of Mahomet continues to grow, so does the school system. A couple of years ago, the junior high school building had over 200 more students than it had been built for, forcing the school district to get creative to accommodate the influx of students.
The school board in 2023 approved portable classrooms to be used, which was the fallback option to a proposed $59 million referendum that was rejected by taxpayers in 2022. The village, which continues to deal with a bursting population, asked taxpayers in November to approve a near $113 million referendum to build new schools, but the proposal was turned down by voters.
Mahomet-Seymour school district’s growth has created an uneven playing field in the Apollo Conference.
The school dominates at least five different sports.
The girls’ volleyball team has won six consecutive Apollo Conference championships. During that stretch dating back to 2019, the Bulldogs have gone 69-5 in the Apollo Conference.
Last spring, the baseball team wrapped up its third straight conference title with a 31-3 record in conference play the past three seasons, while the girls soccer team has won 53 of its 56 games against conference opponents and captured the conference championship in all but one season (not including the cancelled 2020 season) since Mahomet-Seymour left the Corn Belt Conference in 2017.
The boys have been successful in soccer, too, winning the conference championship five out of the past six years, including this fall with a conference record of 56-5-8 since 2019.
Friday nights are heavily impacted by the growing numbers as well.
No other Apollo Conference team has had an answer for the Bulldogs’ football team in the last four years. Mahomet-Seymour has won 21 consecutive Apollo Conference games, and four consecutive conference championships. This season, the Bulldogs posted double-digit wins in all their conference games, and beat Charleston, Effingham and Mattoon by over 48 points.
The Bulldogs have lots of talent on their roster. Mahomet-Seymour has 69 players listed on its roster, which is only four less than the combined number of players for both Charleston’s and Mattoon’s high school football teams.
While I’m not trying to discredit the hard work of the players and coaches that earned their wins, the advantage that these programs have over their Apollo Conference competitors is that they get to assemble a team with a way larger group of high schoolers at their disposal than anyone else in the conference.
And with the village continuing to grow, the pool is getting bigger and bigger.
Mahomet-Seymour has outgrown the Apollo Conference, and for parity to be restored in so many sports across the conference, the two must realize that they’re better as friends than together and go their separate ways.
The relationship between Mahomet-Seymour and the rest of the Apollo Conference is only going only get more toxic as Bulldog teams get bigger and more skillful and frustrations from other coaches build.
The Bulldogs have the perfect landing spot.
The Big Twelve conference currently has 11 teams, and adding Mahomet-Seymour means the conference (as the name suggests) would increase to 12 teams, which would allow the Big Twelve to split into two divisions. Separate divisions in the Big Twelve would mean doubling the amount of automatic playoff bids the conference gets for football, giving teams common opponents and a set schedule every season, and most importantly, cutting out some of the extreme travel times.
A move to the Big Twelve would behoove Mahomet-Seymour because of the ability to face opposition of a similar skill level more often. That was taken under consideration when the Bulldogs added games against Highland and Sycamore during the non-conference portion of their football schedule this season.
For the remaining Apollo Conference members, while they would need to find another member to restore the six-team conference, they might be able to attract schools such as Salem, Paris, Robinson and Richland County. All those schools have close ties to the Apollo Conference and were members until the travel became too much. Getting a rapidly growing school like Mahomet-Seymour out of the conference could attract those schools to come back or attract similarly sized schools to join.
High school sports are at their best when games are competitive and there’s parity among the different sports.
The numbers show that this extended run of conference success in multiple sports correlates with the population growth of Mahomet.
The rest of the schools in the Apollo conference have little chance of catching up.
Gabe Newman can be reached at 581-2812 or at ghnewman@eiu.edu.