Gateway-West Central Conference

The Gateway-West Central Conference is an affiliated pair of former high school athletic conferences with their membership concentrated in west central Wisconsin. Competing from 1941 to 1952, all member schools belonged to the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association.

History

The Gateway-West Central Conference was founded in 1941, resulting from a split of the nine-member South Central Conference. Logan High School in La Crosse was not only the largest high school in the conference, it was the most dominant with perennial contenders in multiple sports. Coupled with being a geographic outlier in west central Wisconsin, the smaller schools to the east (Baraboo, Portage, Reedsburg, Richland Center and Wisconsin Dells) voted to remove Logan from the conference in 1941. The three closest schools geographically to Logan (Sparta, Tomah and Viroqua) voted with Logan to keep them in the conference, but were outnumbered by a 5-4 margin and formed the Gateway Conference. Another conference under the same organizational structure was formed by three members of the Gateway (Sparta, Tomah and Viroqua), along with Mauston of the Juneau County League and Westby of the Monroe-Vernon Conference which was called the West Central Conference. The two conferences were affiliated but competed for two different championships, and all games played between the three dual members counted in the standings for both leagues. This arrangement lasted until 1952 when the two conferences were disbanded after the South Central Conference was reformed.