Austin Guo

The logo of the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference (MIC) on the basketball court in the varsity gym. Carmel became an independent school after the Hoosier Crossroads Conference declined to allow it and Center Grove to join.

What does it mean for most sports now that CHS is an independent school?

There’ll be a couple things that will change that our students and our parents and fans will notice kind of right away. Obviously, we will not be participating in one day conference championship format. So that would be (for) cross country, wrestling, swimming, tennis, track — those are some of the sports that would not have those one day events that they participated in the past. We’ll replace those with other high quality, elite opponent type invitationals that will seek out to find and in some of those cases, we may host our own on those dates.

What opportunities and consequences arise from CHS being an independent school?

Those are the big things and there’ll be some recognition that we will no longer have anymore, mostly being the all-conference selections in various sports too. So that will be that will be one of the negatives of it. But we’re trying to view this as an opportunity for us to continue to compete against other schools and sometimes just play some opponents that we haven’t been able to play because of our commitments in various sports to play each team in the MIC conference.

When will CHS no longer be a part of MIC?

Our end date with the MC will be in March of this year. So at the end of the winter sports season, when boys basketball ends, our affiliation with the MIC (ends) at that point. So that will begin with our spring sports. They will not be participating in any conference events with the MIC starting the spring of 2022.

Do you foresee CHS joining another conference or staying independent?

We’re gonna ride being independent for the foreseeable future and see how that’s working for us. And at this point, we feel like we’re still going to be able to provide great opportunities for kids and experiences without being in a conference at this time. So there’s not going to be a jump to “Oh my gosh, we’ve got to be in a conference!” We got to figure that out. That’s not our focus at all right now.