West Central Heat Boys Basketball: 2026-27 Schedule and History
West Central Heat · Biggsville, Illinois · Lincoln Trail Conference
Coach: Doug Dennison · All-time: 133-306 (.303) · 18 recorded seasons
West Central boys basketball is the only programme in this coverage area with no IHSA hardware of any kind. Not a regional, not a district, nothing — in eighteen recorded seasons the Titles column is completely empty.
An empty trophy case, stated plainly
We checked this rather than assumed it. Across the whole table, from 2005-06 to 2024-25, there is not a single title code and not a single Place value. Thirteen other area boys programmes have at least one regional; West Central have none.
The all-time record is 133-306, a .303 winning percentage — also the lowest of the fourteen.
What the predecessors won
The history before consolidation is more encouraging, and it is filed separately.
Biggsville (Union) carries 370-485 across 37 seasons, a .433 record running from 1960-61 to 2003-04, with regional championships in 1981-82 and 1996-97.
Biggsville — the earlier school again — carries 41-8 across two recorded seasons, a .837 mark, with district titles in 1944-45 and 1945-46.
The district also draws from Media, Oquawka, Stronghurst and Stronghurst (Southern). Those tables exist but would not return complete totals when we read them, so we are not quoting figures for them.
Where the programme is now
Difficult. The last three documented seasons are 3-27, 1-30 and 6-24 — ten wins in three years, and a one-win season in 2023-24.
Doug Dennison took over for 2024-25 and improved the record to 6-24. Worth knowing about Dennison: he is the coach who took United to their only regional title in 2021-22, going 27-7 that season. He has done this job before, at a school twenty miles away, and done it well.
The IHSA has no 2025-26 row for West Central boys, so last season is not on the public record.
How it compares to West Central’s other sports
Football is where this school is thriving. The eight-man Heat are 3-0 this autumn, having beaten Galva 62-22 in Week 3, and they made the I8FA playoffs last year.
Volleyball carries 146-152 with one regional title, in 2018-19. So across three sports the school has two regional championships, both won by girls teams, and a football programme currently unbeaten.
Basketball is the outlier, and it has been for twenty years.
2026-27 schedule
Around eight games are posted for 2026-27. IHSA boys practice is scheduled to open Monday, November 9.
We will publish the full schedule on this page as soon as it is posted, and update results through the season.
Finding West Central online
There are two West Central high schools in Illinois and they are constantly confused. This one is the Heat, in Biggsville, Henderson County. The other is the Cougars of Winchester, in Scott County, 130 miles south — and several MaxPreps pages wrongly tag the Biggsville school as “coop w Winchester”, which is a data error, not a real arrangement. The IHSA files this school under Biggsville. Searching “West Central Heat” is what reliably reaches it.
Coverage of Lincoln Trail basketball is thin in general. MaxPreps carries schedules and scores when schools update them, which is inconsistent at this level. The IHSA’s record pages are authoritative but frequently years behind. No local outlet runs a nightly area scoreboard in winter.
We will post results on this page through the season. If you have a score before we do, send it and it goes up with credit.
The school
West Central Community Unit School District 235 serves Biggsville, Media, Stronghurst, Gladstone and Raritan in Henderson County, in the far west of our coverage area near the Mississippi. It is one of the smallest districts in the Lincoln Trail Conference and the only area school playing eight-man football alongside Galva and Ridgewood.
What we are still chasing
- The 2025-26 season record, which the IHSA has not filed
- Complete all-time figures for the Media, Oquawka and Stronghurst predecessor programmes
- The full 2026-27 schedule and roster
Where West Central Heat rank in the area
Across the fourteen boys basketball programmes we cover, West Central Heat sit fourteenth by all-time wins (133), fourteenth by winning percentage (.303) and fourteenth by regional championships (no).
No area boys basketball programme has won fewer. The next above is United Red Storm, on 250.
With no regional title on record, West Central Heat have never reached the sectional round.
No state finals trophy. Seven area programmes have one; this is not among them.
Full comparisons for every programme, plus conference structure, season dates and how the Illinois postseason works, are on our area boys basketball guide.
By the numbers
| Games on record | 439 |
| Recorded seasons | 18 |
| Average wins per season | 7.4 |
| Average games per season | 24 |
| Regional titles | 0 |
| Share of all area regionals | 0.0% |
| Years since last regional | — |
West Central have no regional title to date, so the final row has nothing to measure. That is the fact this page keeps returning to.
The only empty column in the area
Thirteen of the fourteen boys programmes we cover have at least one regional title. West Central have none, and the Titles column in their IHSA table is blank from top to bottom. The two regional championships in the school district lineage both belong to Biggsville (Union), before the consolidation, in 1981-82 and 1996-97.
Send us results
Rosters, schedules, scores, corrections, photographs — send them and they go up with credit. We correct errors the same day we learn about them.
All-time record, championship years and state finishes from the IHSA’s per-school record page at ihsa.org, with the school total arithmetically verified against its individual season rows — the coach subtotals sum exactly to 133-306 across 18 recorded years, and the empty Titles column was confirmed by a direct query across the whole table. Coaching and schedule detail from MaxPreps team pages, retrieved September 2026. Corrections posted the same day.
