The Daily Standard
Story Archive
The MAC at 50, 1973-2023
"The MAC hasn't yet had its first official athletic competition, but the future is as bright as a blinding sun on a mid-August day."
- The Daily Standard, Sept. 11, 1973.
When Bob Shraluka, then the sports editor of The Daily Standard, wrote those words in a story talking about the upcoming debut of the Midwest Athletic Conference, no one could have imagined how prophetic that paragraph would be.
Since its debut in the fall of the 1973-74 school year, the conference has become not only the best small-school conference in the state of Ohio, but one of the most successful in the nation.
Before 1973, teams from the Mercer and Auglaize County area produced just one state championship (Fort Recovery's 1971 Class A boys basketball title) to go with a few other state appearances, such as the 1945 and 1946 St. Henry baseball teams led by a future major leaguer named Wally Post and a young man who would go on to coach Coldwater to five state baseball titles named Lou Brunswick.
Since 1973, the MAC has won 150 state team championships in numerous OHSAA-sanctioned sports. Individual athletes in track and field, cross country and bowling have won state titles as well.
Over the years, folks have come up and asked if anyone has ever thought about writing a book about the MAC.
It certainly has come to my mind over the years, but it's a process that would require manpower, hours and a lot of help from the MAC communities.
While not a book, we feel we've come up with a plan to honor the 50th anniversary of the MAC with a feature series taking up this entire school year, running on Tuesdays to start the year.
Our group of writers: myself, Tom Haines, Dave Stilwell and Colin Foster along with Robb Hemmelgarn, who serves as the historian for both our sports department and the MAC, have been busy writing articles - in the case of Robb, also retooling some of his stories that ran as part of his "Curtain Call" series - through the summer, and we will run one a week during the season to cover some of the most important teams, moments and people in the first 50 years of the MAC.
We will also rely the schools of the MAC, who were positive in their support, to help us track down pictures from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to help tell the story along with the words. Folks in the community have also been helpful in the process, offering scrapbooks from over the years that could be scanned for art.
We'll talk to coaches, players, athletic directors and other folks who have been key in the success of the MAC and continue to help the conference grow.
We'll start at the beginning, the formation of the conference and gentlemen like Jon Sidenbender, who could take the honor of being called "Mr. MAC." We'll go through the seasons, starting with fall sports and work into winter, and then finish next spring with the spring sports before wrapping up with a look at the future of the MAC.
Our plan, over the next 40 weeks or so, is to give a memorable look at the MAC. We hope that you will enjoy it.
And, who knows? We might be able to get that book out of the process.
