Probably no part of the Hastings High story has been a bigger part of Nebraska prep sports history than the Tigers time in the Nebraska Big Ten Conference.
In 1943 North Platte had a fine football team, a loss to Grand Island and a tie with Kearney being the only blemishes. But, they didn’t get the respect from the big city papers they thought they deserved. The newspaper raters pointed at the Bulldog schedule that included mostly small western schools. The Platters, along with McCook and Kearney, were then members of the Southwest Conference, a descendant of which still survives today with mainly Class C schools.
North Platte principal Otto Oakes and coach Charles ‘Tommy’ Thomas started looking around for solutions to their scheduling dilemma. They found that their scheduling worries were shared by many of the other large out-state schools. Quickly a conference plan was built around two rivalries, North Platte-McCook in the west and Grand Island-Hastings in the central. Kearney was naturally included as middle ground, and the newspapers announced the imminent creation of the Big Five.
Things didn’t stop there, though. Schools with similar concerns to the east and west were soon expressing their interests in being included. The idea was also popular with the newspaper hacks around the state, who saw this as a great improvement in high school sports and as a source of more stories for them to write about.
Columbus, Norfolk and Fremont in the east, and Scottsbluff and Alliance in the west all wanted in. Geographically, the conference was suddenly dealing with more mileage than any league in Nebraska—and maybe anywhere else-- had ever considered.
East West
Columbus Alliance
Fremont Kearney
Grand Island McCook
Hastings North Platte
Norfolk Scottsbluff
Scottsbluff coach Bill Putnam began fighting those worries right away, arguing that if the ‘Bluffs and Lincoln High could keep their longstanding football series alive during wartime gas rationing—which they did, that forming a conference like this in peacetime should be an easier trick. One also shouldn’t discount the rampant optimism of the post-World War II era in providing some of the energy it took to put such a grand plan and far-flung conference together.
With the Big Five now the Big Ten, thoughts turned to nuts and bolts scheduling. Early in the process coaches and administrators were quick to point out that they would not be doing full round-robin scheduling. Of course, it makes sense to not be traversing the 382 miles from Norfolk to Scottsbluff every football and basketball season.
The new league threaded this needle by creating two divisions, east and west. Each division would play round robin in football and, eventually, double round robin in basketball, while playing cross-divisional games when it worked for both schools. The division winners in basketball and football would meet in league championship games. This format guaranteed a school like North Platte more cache with the public; a football team in contention for a state title would now have a minimum five solid games versus Class A competition, the prestige of a conference championship game, and the attention of the entire state the week they played that last game.
It was a big change from before even for a centrally-located school like Columbus which had had only three games vs. big schools on its 1944 schedule. The new Nebraska Big Ten had declared they were not to be second-class citizens in Class A sports. Basically, those ten schools had guaranteed that their champion would get serious consideration for the state title from the newspapermen in Omaha and Lincoln every year.
The Nebraska Big Ten continued with the same composition of ten teams well into the 1970s. Double round robin basketball scheduling (at least in the East division) went from 1957-1979. By 1981 travel concerns had convinced Alliance and Kearney to leave the conference. The conference finally dissolved in 1985 and was replaced with the Greater Nebraska Athletic Conference which included many of the same teams and the Lincoln Public Schools in two divisions.