The Cardinal Huskies will be joining the Northeastern Athletic Conference (NAC) at the start of the 2025-26 school year.
The Cardinal Huskies will be joining the Northeastern Athletic Conference (NAC) at the start of the 2025-26 school year.
Cardinal will become the third school in the recent past to leave the Chagrin Valley Conference (CVC) and move into the NAC.
Fairport Harbor joined the NAC in the fall of 2020, and the Grand Valley Mustangs will begin NAC play this fall.
With the addition of Cardinal in the fall of 2025, the NAC will have 13 teams: Badger, Bristol, Bloomfield, Cardinal, Chalker, Fairport Harbor, Grand Valley, Lordstown, Mathews, Maplewood, Pymatuning Valley, Saint John and Windham.
Cardinal Athletic Director Jimmy Soltis explained the main reason Cardinal decided to join the Northeast Athletic Conference (NAC): enrollment has been trending down for the past decade.
“The NAC just provides a better fit with the size school we are, the sports we offer, (and) the competitiveness,” Soltis said. “The NAC provides a lot for us, and I think our kids are going to benefit a lot from it. … I think it is the right thing to do for them.”
Although Cardinal will move to the NAC from the CVC, Soltis emphasized that Cardinal teams will still compete against teams from the CVC. Specifically, Cardinal teams will face NAC opponents twice per season and CVC rivals only once.
“Right now we play everybody in our CVC division twice, and I play all the NAC schools once, for the most part in all of our team sports,” Soltis said. “It’s just going to flip — we’ll play all the NAC schools twice.
“Our non-conference will be the six to eight CVC schools that we routinely play.”
That means Cardinal will continue to play Berkshire, even though they will be in different conferences.
“We’ll never leave Berkshire, we’ll play them in everything,” Soltis said. “We obviously have a great relationship with them. Instead of trying to play them Week 10 in football, we might play them in Week 1.”
It is not uncommon for membership in area conferences to change over time.
In fact, before the CVC began in 1964, many high schools in Northeast Ohio were members of the Geauga County League and the Cuyahoga County League.
When the CVC began in 1964, charter members of the conference were Chagrin Falls, Kenston and West Geauga, as well as Orange, Solon, and Twinsburg.
At the same time that the CVC started, Cardinal was a member of the Great Lakes Conference, which also included Burton, Grand Valley, Kirtland, Ledgemont, Newbury and Pymatuning Valley.
In 1968, Cardinal joined the East Suburban Conference and was a member of that league until 1996, when it joined the CVC.
In response to Cardinal deciding to join the NAC, CVC Commissioner Don Lewis said Cardinal had been in the conference for many years and is an excellent member.
