East Husker loses, adds school

by Nathan Arneal
Published 2/28/24

There will be a change in the lineup of the East Husker Conference for the 2024-2025 school year.

In January, Twin River informed the EHC that is would be leaving to join the Crossroads Conference. Just over a week ago, Wakefield announced it was joining the East Husker.

Twin River, with its high school located in Genoa, joined the EHC in 2012, one of four schools that joined that year during the conference’s first major expansion in decades.

Though all four additions that year – which also included Howells-Dodge, Clarkson/Leigh and Humphrey – were on the west side of the conference, Twin River was a bit of an outlier on the southwest corner of the new footprint.

In the Crossroads Conference, Twin River will still be on the edge, this time the northern edge. The Crossroads will involve shorter trips for the Titans, with an average distance of 60 miles to Crossroads schools compared to an average of 74 miles to EHC schools.

Twin River was within 40 miles of only one East Husker school, Humphrey. It will have four schools closer than 40 miles in its new conference in Cross County, High Plains, Osceloa and Shelby/Rising City.

The Crossroads will also give Twin River just one trip over 100 miles, a 105-mile journey to Meridian. In the EHC, Bancroft-Rosalie, Lyons-Decatur and Tekamah-Herman were all over 100 miles while Pender sat at 99 miles.

The Crossroads’ schools are also smaller. Twin River was tied as the ninth largest school in the East Husker. It will be the second largest school in the Crossroads, behind only Cross County.

Wakefield has been a member of the Lewis and Clark Conference in the northeast corner of the state since its founding in the 1940s.
Recently, three members of the Lewis and Clark Conference – Hartington-Newcastle, Laurel-Concord-Coleridge and Plainview – announced they would be leaving to form a new conference with schools to their west in 2025. Another L&C school, Ponca, announced it is joining the Mid-State Conference.

Hearing this news, the members of the East Husker Conference expansion committee, which includes North Bend Central superintendent Patrick Ningen, recommended the EHC executive committee extend an invitation to Wakefield to replace the departing Twin River.

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