The Cardinal Huskies will be giving it everything they have to win as many Chagrin Valley Conference Valley Division championships as they can this year. As of June 13, Cardinal was unanimously approved to join the Northeastern Athletic Conference by the principals and athletic directors for the 2025-26 season, making this the final year it will compete in the CVC.
“We are going to be in the smallest division across the board pretty much in the Valley Division. The schools that we have been playing for years, they have twice as many boys and twice as many girls as we do,” Huskies’ Athletic Director Jimmy Soltis told The Weekly Villager on June 20. “We owe it to our kids to do the right thing and this is the time to do it.”
The Huskies will be leaving the CVC, consisting of 24 teams, which they have been members of since the 1996-97 season to join the NAC, which already has 11 member schools. Soltis said it is still undetermined whether the NAC will place the Huskies in the Stars or Stripes Division.
According to Soltis, he wanted to explore Cardinal’s options once it was announced that longtime CVC school Grand Valley announced it would be departing the conference after the 2023-24 season.
With enrollment numbers in Middlefield significantly decreasing each year, the Huskies were one of the smallest schools not just in the CVC Valley Division but the entire conference.
Soltis said that at one point Cardinal’s class size for each grade hovered around 100 students but has steadily decreased, with several grades consisting of only 60 students and some having only 40 students. The low enrollment numbers have made it difficult for the Huskies to match the competitive level of their conference rivals.
“When you stack them on top of each other and you are playing them week after week, it just takes a toll on the kids physically and mentally so that was one of the reasons to make the change,” he added. “We will still play all of those schools. I still have a relationship with all of the schools. We get to pick and choose which ones we play which is nice and it is not week-after-week.”
Soltis noted that the NAC had invited Cardinal to join the conference several times in the last decade but the Huskies had always declined. Toward the end of the 2023-24 school year, Soltis said he received permission from the Board of Education to pursue a new conference for the Huskies to join.
After years of being courted by the NAC, Cardinal finally accepted the invitation and has given its notice to depart the CVC to Commissioner Don Lewis a year in advance. Although the Huskies have one final year remaining in the CVC, Soltis stressed there were some schools that Cardinal wanted to continue competing against on its non-conference schedule, including Kinsman Road rival Berkshire.
“We are just five minutes apart and that rivalry will not dwindle at all and if anything, it might heat up a little bit,” he said. “We will end up playing them once a year but there will be some things we can still do twice.”
Soltis said that in addition to high school athletics, Cardinal will also miss the youth level sports and the academic competitions between the CVC member schools. Having participated in those activities for as long as he can remember, he hopes that the NAC can offer those types of extracurriculars but if not, he is eager to present a plan to implement those programs to the NAC.
Although the Huskies will be newcomers to the NAC, they are familiar with most of the schools in the conference as they have played against those teams several times in their non-conference schedule.
“Some of them we play them in everything,” Soltis said. The travel is the same, it does not increase travel and may actually lessen travel.”
As the Huskies prepare for competition against the CVC Valley Division, Soltis acknowledged that the Cardinal coaches are attempting to motivate the student-athletes to make sure Cardinal’s final year as a CVC school is one for the record books.
“I know a lot of them are out to win that league championship and I think the kids are motivated by it,” he said. “Just like any school leaving a conference, I think they all want to go out with a bang and everyone is gung ho but everyone is also excited to join the NAC. I think it will be a good transition and everyone is looking forward to it.”
