T-R FILE PHOTO - South Tama County’s Keith Keahna (33) looks toward the basket against defenders from the East team during the WaMaC Conference Senior Shoot Out at Benton Community on March 16, 2019, in Van Horne. South Tama has petitioned to leave the WaMaC in favor of rejoining the North Iowa Cedar League.

TAMA — After 10 years competing in the WaMaC Conference, district administration at South Tama County has begun pursuing a different conference to call home — in this case, a familiar one.

On April 8, South Tama sent a letter to the North Iowa Cedar League (NICL) formally requesting to rejoin the conference during the 2025-26 school year. The request would include all school sports and activities.

The letter cited issues such as decline in enrollment and extracurricular participation numbers as well as travel distance as reasons for seeking the change in conference. The NICL is a 15-member conference featuring mostly 2A and a few 1A sized schools.

Members include AGWSR, Aplington-Parkersburg, Waterloo Columbus Catholic, Denver, Dike-New Hartford, East Marshall, Gladbrook-Reinbeck, Grundy Center, Hudson, Jesup, Sumner-Fredericksburg, South Hardin, Oelwein, Union Community and Wapsie Valley.

Should South Tama be admitted into the NICL, it would be the largest district by a sizable margin. The most recent BEDS enrollment shows South Tama at 358 with the next largest NICL school, Oelwein, at 259. Roughly two-thirds of the 15 high schools presently in the NICL are below 200 in BEDS enrollment.

It’s not clear, however, if the schools in the NICL will be open to approving South Tama’s request to return to their conference. NICL administrators are expected to take it up at their next meeting in late April.

South Tama’s history with the NICL dates back to 1936, when Tama High School and Toledo High School were members of the Iowa Cedar Conference.

By the time the schools consolidated to become South Tama County in the 1960s, the Iowa Cedar League had split into separate north and south conferences and the Trojans had moved on to the East Central Conference and later the Central Iowa Conference into the 1990s.

South Tama returned to the NICL in 2011 after leaving the Little Hawkeye Conference. The membership lasted only a few years when the Trojans, somewhat abruptly, left the NICL for the WaMaC Conference in 2014.

The reasoning given for the move in 2014 was that South Tama was seeking a conference that better matched their enrollment and could offer additional sports like soccer, games for freshman and frosh-level teams and more robust conference events for fine arts activities.

According to STC High School Activities Director Chelsea Ahrens, the NICL has evolved to include many of the programs STC was looking for when they left the conference a decade ago.

Meanwhile, the WaMaC Conference has been in a constant state of change over the past several years. In 2018, the conference lost Western Dubuque and Anamosa. Two years later, in 2020, Central DeWitt departed, followed by Maquoketa and Beckman Catholic that dropped the total number of schools down to 11 in 2022.

The Grinnell Tigers joined the WaMaC Conference in 2023 to bump the roster back up to 12 schools.

The wild card right now remains Waverly Shell-Rock, which has twice applied to join the WaMaC Conference after being removed from the Northeast Iowa Conference in 2022 due to their enrollment (just under 600) increasing to outsized proportions.

WaMaC Conference administrators declined both requests, but Waverly-Shell Rock voted this month to appeal the conference’s decision, which would put the matter in front of the Iowa Department of Education to help mediate a solution.

The state department would have the authority to force the WaMaC Conference to accept Waverly-Shell Rock, though it remains to be seen if they would undertake such a measure.