#HL40: The Origin Story
By Joey Yashinsky, Horizon League Contributor. Follow on Twitter @OneSeatOver
Get a massive sheet cake and a whole box of candles.
The Horizon League is turning 40 this season.
At the beginning, it was known as the Midwestern City Conference. All the members were private schools. Six of them, to be exact: Butler, Evansville, Loyola Chicago, Oklahoma City, Oral Roberts, and Xavier.
That was 40 years ago. Today, the conference is still motoring on, healthy as ever, with 19 different sports and over 2,700 Division I student-athletes.
Jim Shaffer, the League’s commissioner from 1984-89, remembers the many challenges in finding a permanent home for the very young athletic conference.
“I got hired as commissioner and my first official duty was to relocate the office from above a barbershop in Champaign, Illinois,” said Shaffer. “We had mostly just files and a little bit of furniture. They asked me in my interview, ‘We’re thinking of moving the offices to St. Louis, Chicago, or Indianapolis. What are your thoughts?’ And I highly recommended Indianapolis for a number of reasons. That was right when the city was becoming the amateur sports capital of the world and I had heard they’d done a great job with the 1980 Final Four. There were good reasons to go to any of those three locations, but I was glad they went along with my choice.”
And so in 1984, Indianapolis officially welcomed the MCC to town.
“I moved the belongings over from above the barbershop in a Ryder truck, and we set up at Butler University,” said Shaffer. “Butler at the time was very generous to give us office space for $125 a month behind a two-story brick building. It was a former WIBC radio station. There was a little section behind the building and that’s where the first MCC offices were.”
A year later, the name of the conference underwent a slight alteration, changing from the Midwestern City Conference to the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. The League offices moved again, but still remained in Indianapolis.
“Browning Investments came to us and said we’re trying to help amateur sports. They gave us an offer we couldn’t refuse,” said Shaffer. “There was a note sent out to all the sports groups, saying they were building the Pan-American Plaza building, so we thought, “I think we’re gonna move again! We thought it would be cool to pick Suite 500 because of the Indy 500, and that’s where the League offices still are today.”
During that time, there were exciting developments within the conference. Notre Dame, one of the most prestigious sports programs in the country, saw all of its League-sponsored teams participate in the MCC (except for men’s basketball). Women’s sports were also added to the conference, further strengthening the overall product.
“When I interviewed for the job, they said, ‘By the way, you’ll also be the commissioner of the North Star Conference,’ which was about an eight-team women’s league at the time,” said Shaffer. “I finally went to all the athletic directors and just said, ‘Why don’t we merge both leagues?’ It was a really well-endorsed decision, so we dissolved the North Star, and in turn we became a lot more legitimate because now we had both men’s and women’s sports in one league.”
When current commissioner Jon LeCrone took over in 1992, he was greeted with a challenging scenario and a changing conference landscape.
“During my very first meeting in June of 1992, it became very clear to me that Dayton wanted out of the League, said LeCrone. “Had I known that, would I have taken the job? I don’t know, maybe I would have, maybe not. Dayton is not only my hometown, but it also has a great basketball program. In short order, Dayton left, which caused Xavier to leave, which caused Evansville to leave, which caused Duquesne to leave, which caused La Salle to leave. It was a mess.”
LeCrone was not to be deterred.
“So now we are Butler, Detroit and Loyola, but no one else. And that was when [Wright State Director of Athletics] Mike Cusack phoned and said, ‘I’ve got an idea for you. Would you be open to listening?’ At this point, I’m open to listening to anything! Mike suggested we take Butler, Detroit and Loyola and add to that what we think are the six best basketball schools from the Mid-Con. He thought that could be a very good league.”
And that’s exactly what happened. On December 9, 1993, it was announced that Cleveland State, Green Bay, Milwaukee, UIC, Wright State, and Northern Illinois would be leaving the Mid-Continent Conference to join LeCrone’s growing fleet.
“All of a sudden, we went from three to nine, and that really transformed who we were,” said LeCrone. “We went from completely private, Big East type, parochial, to a really exciting public-private mix. Adaptability was the key.”
A handful of years later, the MCC was flourishing, but still looking for a stronger, more unique league name to capture the public’s imagination.
“When we added the new publics, I just thought it was time for a new brand, sort of a new beginning” said LeCrone. “We hired a branding company, they led us through a process, and we landed on Horizon League.”
“I wanted our name to mean something. We picked the word horizon because it symbolized this junction between the earth and the sky. Symbolically for us, it represented the junction between the student and the athlete. When does a horizon take place? In the morning, there are new beginnings, a rising sun. You can never get all the way to the horizon, so it’s aspirational, always reaching. And then the word ‘league’ was important because we wanted our name to be educationally-tethered, like the Ivy League.”
Like with any major change, however, it did not come without some skepticism.
“There was definitely some resistance,” said LeCrone. “People were asking, ‘What is a Horizon League?’ Our branding firm assured us that we would become our name, and that is exactly what happened. We wanted the Horizon League to represent who we are and who we wanted to be, rather than where we were located or how many teams we had.”
Today, the Horizon League is ten schools strong, with Detroit Mercy the most senior member, having come onboard in 1980. Five of the six programs from the major 1994 expansion still remain (Cleveland State, Green Bay, UIC, Milwaukee, Wright State). Four schools have been added to the mix since the conference officially became the Horizon League: Youngstown State (2001), Oakland (2013), Northern Kentucky (2015), and IUPUI (2017).
Shaffer looks back happily on his time at the helm of the MCC and future Horizon League.
“It still has a real fond place in my heart,” said Shaffer. “Those were probably some of the best years of my career, coming in to take over a fledgling Division I conference. So many people contributed to it and the city of Indianapolis really embraced us. And the League is as good as ever today.”
It’s anybody’s guess what exciting developments will occur within the Horizon League over the next 40 years.
For now, the League, its ten schools, and its many fans will enjoy a season-long celebration commemorating four decades of excellence and everlasting college sports memories.
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For complete coverage of the Horizon League’s 40th anniversary, including videos and audio interviews, click here and follow on social media @HorizonLeague and by using #HL40.