Husticon To Join Eastern Suburban Conference in 2022

The Husticon football defense faces off against the Dodgeland offense during a game played last season in Horicon. Husticon and Dodgeland will, again, be regular rivals starting next year, as the two teams will join the Eastern Suburban football-only conference for the 2022 season.

file photo

MITCHELL BRADLEY KELLER

JOURNALIST

Back in 2019, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) announced that it would be creating “football-only” conferences, which were intended to begin in the 2020 season, and, after more than one year of waiting, the Horicon-Hustisford cooperative football team (Husticon), last week, finally heard word of its new home in the Eastern Suburban Conference (ESC).

The original realignment was announced in 2019 – much to the chagrin of Husticon and roughly two dozen other schools across the state that found the WIAA’s mission to “provide a conference affiliation for all member schools grouped by enrollment and by geography” had failed (in some cases) to meet the organization’s own criteria.

Husticon was realigned to the Capitol Large conference, wherein (even as a cooperative) the team had one of the smallest enrollments of the eight teams.

Furthermore, travel times to and from Horicon would have been the longest within the conference: Big Foot and Beloit Turner are both more than 80 miles away, while Lodi is more than 50 and Lake Mills is nearly 40 (with an estimated travel-time to Lake Mills coming in around 50 minutes).

Husticon head coach Shannon Mueller described the Capitol Large realignment in one word: frustrating.

As a result, Mueller and the athletic directors for the two schools formally requested a new placement.

The process to request a new conference took more than one year and was executed throughout the pandemic, but Husticon finally has a permanent home in the ESC.

Husticon will play the likes of Clinton, Marshall, Markesan, Cambridge, Waterloo, Dodgeland and Palmyra-Eagle. This iteration of the ESC is largely a combination of former Trailways Conference teams with former Capitol Conference teams.

Because of the pandemic-shortened season, Husticon did not play in the Capitol Large Conference for 2020, and the team will do so for just one season in 2021. Husticon will join the ESC in 2022.