The Big Eight Conference was a high school athletic league in Iowa made up of some of the largest schools in the state.
Contents
Members
History
The Big Eight Conference was formed in 1963 when Des Moines North and Des Moines East left the old Big Six Conference to compete in the Metropolitan Conference. The league's four remaining members (Fort Dodge, Mason City, and the Waterloo schools) reached out to other large schools in central Iowa to rebuild the conference. Cedar Falls joined from the Northeast Iowa Conference and Ames, Marshalltown, and Newton joined from the Central Iowa Conference. While Waterloo Central played against the Big Eight Schools in various sports, it is unknown if the school was a member of the conference, since the school was converted into a middle school in 1988.
From the onset, the league was one of the strongest in the state. In its first year of competition, league schools captured state championships in four of the seven sports the IHSAA conducted championships for at the time. The league also claimed the first two 5-on-5 girls' basketball titles in state history (for many years the IGHSAU only sponsored 6-on-6 basketball). Among other notable achievements, the league also had a stronghold on the boys' cross country title for 12 years, winning a state title all but one year from 1964 to 1975.
The league was stable until the late 1980s when Newton and Ames left to join the Central Iowa Metro League. Soon after, the other members of the conference began looking for new homes. Marshalltown found a home in the CIML. Cedar Falls, Waterloo East, and Waterloo West then joined the Mississippi Valley Conference and Fort Dodge and Mason City, geographic outliers to among the rest of the state's largest schools, followed Marshalltown, Ames, and Newton to the CIML after being originally being declined membership in the league.