Less than a year after the official disbandment of the Portage Trail Conference (2024-2025 school year), a new conference is on the rise with an official announcement on Jan. 16 that the local Portage County schools are reuniting to form the eight-team Portage County league and will begin in the 2027-28 school year.
The new league will consist of seven Portage County schools, Garfield, Crestwood, Ravenna, Mogadore, Rootstown, Waterloo, Southeast and Springfield, which is located in Summit County.
“I know for us, we are excited about it restoring some of the old rivalries that we have had,” Garfield Athletic Director/Track & Field Coach Jim Pflger told The Weekly Villager on Jan. 15. “We have kept a lot of those games going but it just has a different feel when they are conference games, so we are really excited about it.”
Garfield, Southeast and Waterloo will return to the fold after being members of the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference, with the G-Men and Pirates being divisional rivals by belonging to the MVAC Grey Tier while the Vikings have been members of the MVAC Scarlet Tier. Crestwood and Rootstown will depart the Chagrin Valley Conference Valley Division to join to the new league and Ravenna and Springfield will leave the Metro Athletic Conference. Mogadore will enter the new conference after operating as an independent after the PTC folded following the 2024-25 school year.
According to Crestwood Athletic Director Brittany Dye, she is excited for the Red Devil student-athletes to once again enjoy the old Portage County duels that will also now count as conference clashes the same way her teams did when she was a student-athlete at Crestwood.
“My senior year was the last year of the Portage County League,” the Red Devils’ 2005 alum said. “I was able to coach a little bit during the PTC era but that was always shifting too. It is exciting but it is also a little bit new. I feel that as the leaders of all of the schools, we are cut from the same cloth The minute we got in one room together, it felt like we had the same kind of vision for our student-athletes.”
As far as Ravenna Athletic Director Jim Lunardi is concerned, the new conference will bring back a sense of familiarity as the majority of the Portage County duels will not just be conference clashes but also neighborhood battles.
“You can walk into a five-and-dime store, and you actually know who the running back is at Ravenna, Garrettsville or Crestwood. You can compare them with each other,” he added. “A lot of times these kids are starting at a young age, and they are really competing against each other throughout the years. You want to see what happens in the last chapters at their high school; that goes for all sports.”
According to Dye, forming a new Portage County league had been in the works for several years, but the timing finally felt right over the course of the 2025-26 school year for this idea to become a reality.
Lunardi added that while the Portage County schools had been scattered across the MVAC Grey Tier, MVAC Scarlet Tier, the MAC, CVC Valley Division, and the original PTC, there had been discussions about adding a Portage County division to either the MVAC or the MAC, but those ideas never materialized.
Although it will just be like old times when the new league formally begins in the 2026-27 school year, Pfleger, a 1999 Garfield graduate, said that the time spent by several of the local schools in separate leagues has also been enlightening for the Athletic Directors. He is keen to see what new ideas are implemented in the new league.
Although the new conference consists one of school outside of Portage County in Springfield, it is still a familiar program to all Portage County programs as it was a member of the Portage Trail Conference from 2005-2020 before joining Ravenna and Streetsboro in the MAC.
Lunardi also highlighted how much more even footing the programs will find themselves on once the new league begins, as the competitive balance that exists throughout the current conferences is far from equal due to the different enrollment numbers that exist especially in the MAC and the CVC.
“We feel that it is a better fit on multiple different levels than all of the levels that we have previously competed in,” he said.
Pfleger said that the new league also represents an opportunity for the Athletic Directors to implement some new ideas that they had while competing in different conferences over the last several years.
“We have all been spit-balling ideas about some things that we have taken from other conferences that we would like to put into our bylaws and our system to do new things. So I think for us it was positive, but as I said, we are really excited about the new conference.”
