NEW ULM — Minnesota Valley Lutheran will be leaving the Tomahawk Conference to join a new unnamed conference for the 2024-25 school year.

“Monday night our board approved that we could leave the Tomahawk Conference and join a new conference that is currently being developed,” MVL Activities Director Craig Morgan said Tuesday morning. “Right now the new conference will be made up of schools from Maple River, St. Clair, Lake Crystal Wellcome Memorial, LeSueur-Henderson and Sibley East. The Minnesota River Conference is dissolving after next year, so those schools were all looking for a new home so they started pursuing this — they were looking at all of their options.”

Morgan touched on the logistics of the move.

“A couple of us looked at this and felt it was interesting,” Morgan said. “Maple River is in the Gopher Conference and when the Gopher Conference added Medford and Randolph, that really added some distance to their schedule — that was not the direction that they wanted to go.

“St. Clair and Lake Crystal are in the Valley Conference and they are just like us with a lot of Class 1A schools in there. You play them and when you play them, the playoffs are based off of QRF for seedings, you lose a lot of points. (MVL is Class AA).”

“I can beat Sleepy Eye St. Mary’s, who was tied with us in the (Tomahawk) Conference, and beat them in basketball and we barely got any QRF points because they were a Class 1A team.”

Another factor in the decision was school size.

“We are looking at a freshmen class that will be around 80 students — right now we have over 70 registered and we know there are more — so we are looking down the road that we are going to grow,” Morgan said. “So we thought that maybe now is the time to make the move. We have a new [Highway 14] coming through and finishing up this fall. We have moved our softball fields, and this past weekend our board approved our Science addition to our school and a new field house/gym and upgrading our Fine Arts facilities.”

Moving to the new conference should also help the Chargers’ younger teams get more game action.

“We are the only school in the Tomahawk Conference that has girls C-squad basketball in two years,” Morgan said. “Previous to that — three years out — there were a couple that had it, but it just got less and less. So it was hard to find any teams until the other schools’ junior high seasons were done.”

Morgan said that the goal for the new conference to begin is in 2024-25.

Morgan said that despite not being in the Tomahawk Conference, he still will play New Ulm Cathedral in basketball, baseball and softball.

“We would not miss that, unless they do not have any room on their schedule, because I know that they have been talking about adding schools,” Morgan said. “There are still some natural rivalries and is not just in the Tomahawk Conference. The coaches and AD’s are a great group of people.”

Morgan said that the new six-team conference will have 10 round-robin games.

“So I can pick up 14 nonconference games in basketball, baseball and softball,” he said.