The Pride of Iowa Conference (POI ) is a high school athletic conference made up of 10 small schools in southern
Iowa
Iowa () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to the ...
, United States.
Current members
Mount Ayr shares a football team with
Diagonal
In geometry, a diagonal is a line segment joining two vertices of a polygon or polyhedron, when those vertices are not on the same edge. Informally, any sloping line is called diagonal. The word ''diagonal'' derives from the ancient Greek δ ...
.
Nodaway Valley shares a football team with
Orient-Macksburg.
History
The conference was founded in 1987 with six schools: I-35, Wayne, Central Decatur, Mt. Ayr, Southeast Warren, and East Union. For the first 13 years of its history, the conference was quite small and compact. The conference added Nodaway Valley and Martensdale-St. Mary's in 1997, two schools in the same relative area of the state. In 2000 and 2001, the conference underwent a two-year, four-team expansion that more than doubled the geographical area of the conference. Corning (formerly of the Rolling Hills Conference) and Bedford (Corner Conference) joined in 2000; with Lenox (Rolling Hills Conference) and reaching into the Des Moines Metro Area by adding Pleasantville (Heart of Iowa Conference) in 2001. The conference has remained stable since then only losing two schools since 2001. In the fall of 2013,
Corning and
Villisca (
Corner Conference) became
Southwest Valley High School
Southwest Valley High School is rural, public high school located in Corning, Iowa, United States. The school was renamed after Corning Community Schools and Villisca Community Schools entered into a whole-grade sharing agreement. Under the term ...
remaining in the Pride of Iowa for all activities. In 2018, founding school Interstate 35 and Pleasantville left the Pride of Iowa conference for the
West Central Activities Conference, due to growing enrollment and proximity of schools to the Des Moines Metro, decreasing travel for both schools, especially Pleasantville. Beginning for the 2022-2023 school year, South Page School district will be whole-grade sharing with Bedford for the next 3 years.
South Page had previously been associated with Clarinda, who competes in the
Hawkeye 10 Conference.
State championships
External links
Official website
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pride Of Iowa Confernce
High school sports in Iowa
1987 establishments in Iowa
Sports leagues established in 1987