It's been a few years in the making, but Helias High School is returning to an athletic conference.
It was made official Friday morning Helias will be joining the Archdiocesan Athletic Association (AAA), which previously consisted of St. Louis-area Catholic and private schools.
"It's great to have a home," Helias activities director Brad Dempsey said. "We started talking about this a couple of years ago. I wasn't sure it was going to happen, but we kept talking and here we are."
Helias will be one of 13 schools in the conference. The Crusaders and Lady Crusaders will compete in the large division of the AAA.
"Helias is such a wonderful community of students and families who work hard to keep our academics, faith, athletics and activities vibrant," Helias president Fr. Stephen Jones said. "As members of the AAA conference, we will continue to grow in all of those areas."
Helias will be an associate member for the 2017-18 school year before joining the conference full-time for all sports in the 2018-19 season. As an associate member, Helias will compete in conference championships in a few sports next year before starting a full conference schedule in 2018-19.
"This decision is geared around consistency for our school and our kids," Dempsey said. "We're finally going to get to compete in-season for a championship again and that's going to be fun. It's going to be fun for the kids, it's going to be fun for the coaches.
"Sometimes the season can get drawn out and you can lose focus, but competing for a conference championship should help that."
Another advantage to joining the conference is the stability of a schedule in all sports."We've had a lot of schools drop us off their schedules in a lot of sports in the past few years," Dempsey said. "A sport like volleyball or soccer, as successful as we've been, it's tough to get a schedule."
Another example is football, where the Crusaders have struggled to find teams to fill out its nine-game slate in the regular season.
In the AAA large school division for football, Helias will play contests against St. Dominic, Borgia, Cardinal Ritter, St. Mary's and Father Tolton, which is also joining the league. St. Dominic, Borgia and St. Mary's are Class 4 schools in football like Helias, while Cardinal Ritter and Tolton are in Class 3.
The Crusaders will continue to play Hickman, Rock Bridge and Hannibal. The final slot will be filled by DeSmet in the schedule cycle that begins in 2018. A suitable date was not available to continue the series with Battle, but Dempsey said the two schools will try to resume games as soon as possible.
Dempsey stressed football was not the reason Helias joined the AAA.
"Football never entered the conversation with the conference," he said. "This is about all of our sports programs at Helias."
In basketball, Helias will play home and away games with Cardinal Ritter, St. Dominic, Borgia, Tolton, St. Mary's (boys only) and Notre Dame (girls only).
"That's going to be 10 tough games," Dempsey said.
There will be an eight-team conference schedule in sports such as volleyball, softball, baseball and soccer.
Longtime Helias baseball coach Chris Wyrick sees positives in the change.
"It will be nice to have some guaranteed games on the schedule," he said. "Plus if the conference games get rained out, they have to be made up. Non-conference games usually never get made up."
Conference tournaments will be held in sports such as boys and girls golf and tennis, along with cross country and wrestling.
"I think there is going to be a lot of great competition in a lot of sports," Dempsey said. "I think if people go through our schedule through the years, they are going to find that these conference schools will be more consistently competitive than what we've been playing.
"To me, across the board, our schedules will be improved."
There has been talk in recent years Helias, Jefferson City, Rock Bridge and Hickman should attempt to find another school or two to form a conference. Dempsey said there have been informal talks about that among the schools.
"With Helias and Jeff City not playing in football, that was a big hangup," Dempsey said. "But in the other sports, playing home and away with each of them every year, I don't know how much that would have helped any of us with our schedule since we play each of them at least once already."
Helias will still play those three schools in various sports throughout the athletic year.
"We know we get consistent competition against those schools, nothing is going to change there," Dempsey said. "We talk among ourselves all the time about the struggle of trying to fill out schedules without being in a conference.
"But we're not going to have to do that anymore."
Dempsey said he has studied Helias' schedules for the past five years, looking at the school's travel budget for all sports and projected a budget for the future.
"We've done our due diligence to make sure this was the best thing for us," he said. "There isn't going to be much of a change and in some sports, with additional home games because of the conference, the travel could decrease.
"We've broken it down financially and we can make it work."
Two sports offered by the AAA that Helias does not have are swimming and the club sport of boys volleyball.
All of the AAA schools are subject to the 1.35 multiplier by the Missouri State High School Activities Association. With 678 students according to the latest MSHSAA enrollment figures, Helias will be the second largest school in the conference behind St. Dominic (740).
The AAA small school division will consist of Trinity, Bishop DuBourg, Duchesne, St. Charles Lutheran, O'Fallon Christian and Rosati-Kain (girls only).
Helias has been independent in athletics for more than a decade since leaving the North Central Missouri Conference. It was a member of the NCMC from 1981-2003.