Western (Illinois) Revival
Valparaiso to reignite rivalry with old Mid-Con foe across three different sports
As the bus carrying the Valparaiso women’s soccer team pulled out of the Athletics-Recreation Center parking lot on Wednesday afternoon, it turned in the direction toward Interstate 80.
It might as well have been heading down memory lane.
Over the next eight days, three different Valparaiso teams will travel the 270 miles to Macomb, Ill. where the Beacons will face off against Western Illinois. The women’s soccer team will take on the Leathernecks on Thursday night while the football team will battle Western Illinois on Saturday night. Carin Avery and the Valpo volleyball team will travel to Macomb for the Leatherneck Classic and a match with the hosts on Friday, Sept. 19.
While the current generation of Valparaiso athletes don’t have much experience with Western Illinois, save a handful of nonconference games spread across a few sports, there was once a time when the two schools were constant rivals.
Both joined the Association of Mid-Continent Universities in 1982 along with Cleveland State, Eastern Illinois, Green Bay, Missouri State, Northern Iowa and UIC. The league was rebranded the Mid-Continent Conference in 1989, but soon began experiencing a decline in membership.
Missouri State (1990) and Northern Iowa (1991) left for the Missouri Valley Conference in successive years. There was a mass exodus to the Midwestern Collegiate Conference in 1994 when Cleveland State, Green Bay and UIC all bolted for the conference that would eventually be known as the Horizon League.
When Eastern Illinois departed two years later for the Ohio Valley Conference, that left Valparaiso and Western Illinois as the lone remaining charter members of the old AMCU-8.
Whether or not Valparaiso and Western Illinois were true rivals could vary from sport to sport and season to season. There were spicy battles to be sure. Former Western women’s basketball coach Leslie Crane once threw a chair down a hallway following a game against Valparaiso. Plenty of Valpo athletes lamented the long bus trips to Western Illinois. One athlete even went so far as to tell this reporter some 25 years ago that “Macomb isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from there.”
The two charter members continued to battle each other in conference action until 2007 when Valparaiso left for the Horizon League. The Mid-Con was rebranded the Summit League and Western Illinois remained until 2023 when it joined the Ohio Valley Conference.
As Valparaiso and Western Illinois are set to rekindle an old rivalry, The Victory Bell is going to take a look back in the archives at some of the defining moments between the two programs.