West Central Heat Girls Basketball: 2026-27 Schedule and History
West Central Heat · Biggsville, Illinois · Lincoln Trail Conference
2024-25: 7-21 · All-time: 188-195 (.491) · Three regional titles
West Central girls basketball has won three regional championships in sixteen seasons. The IHSA has no record of what two of those teams actually did.
Three regionals, two of them blank
Regional titles (3): 2005-06, 2007-08, 2015-16. No sectionals, no state finals.
Here is the problem. The 2005-06 and 2015-16 title rows carry no win-loss record at all — 2005-06 lists Brad Jackson as coach with no games recorded and no coach total whatsoever; 2015-16 lists Jay Blender the same way.
Blender has no Coach Total line anywhere in the file, so his three seasons contribute nothing to the school total. That is why nineteen listed seasons produce only sixteen counted years, and why 188-195 understates the programme by an unknown margin.
Two of this school’s three championship teams are, as far as the state record is concerned, teams that won a title without playing any games.
Where the programme is now
The recent trend was good and then turned. 19-14 in 2022-23, then 20-8 in 2023-24, then 7-21.
A twenty-win season followed by a seven-win one usually means a graduating class, and at a school this size a single year group decides everything. There is no 2025-26 row on file, so we cannot tell you what happened last winter.
We cannot confirm who is coaching
MaxPreps lists two head coaches for 2026-27 — Tyler Klossing and Jordain Johnson. Klossing is the IHSA’s coach of record through 2024-25, so he is the likelier varsity head, but both carry the same tag and we are not going to assert it.
West Central is the fourth area programme this winter with a doubled head-coach listing, alongside Stark County, Princeville and Wethersfield.
How it compares to West Central volleyball
Volleyball carries 146-152 with one regional title, in 2018-19 — and the same filing problems: eight consecutive seasons with a coach and no record, and a file that stops at 2024-25.
There has also been a coaching move worth noting. Kristen Mynatt, the IHSA’s last volleyball coach of record at West Central, now appears as head volleyball coach at Monmouth-Roseville, with Stephanie Higgins listed in her place at Biggsville. One vacancy created, one filled — consistent, though we have confirmed it in only one source.
2026-27 schedule
Around five games are posted for 2026-27 so far — one of the thinner listings in the conference. IHSA girls practice is scheduled to open Monday, November 2.
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 CUSD 235 serves Biggsville, Media, Stronghurst, Gladstone and Raritan in Henderson County, the far western edge of our coverage area near the Mississippi River. Its nearest Lincoln Trail rivals are a considerable drive east, which makes for some of the longest road trips in the conference.
What we are still chasing
- Which of the two listed head coaches leads the varsity
- Win-loss records for the 2005-06 and 2015-16 regional champions
- Jay Blender’s three-season coaching record, absent from the file
- The 2025-26 season record and the 2026-27 roster
Where West Central Heat rank in the area
Across the fourteen girls basketball programmes we cover, West Central Heat sit thirteenth by all-time wins (188), eleventh by winning percentage (.491) and tenth by regional championships (three).
The nearest programmes by wins are Abingdon-Avon Tornadoes above (247) and United Red Storm below (184).
The sectional round is the wall. West Central Heat have won three regional titles and lost the sectional every time — three exits at the same stage, and no sectional championship in the programme’s history.
No state finals trophy. Five 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 girls basketball guide.
By the numbers
| Games on record | 383 |
| Recorded seasons | 16 |
| Average wins per season | 11.8 |
| Average games per season | 24 |
| Regional titles | 3 |
| Share of all area regionals | 2.7% |
| Years since last regional | 10 |
10 years without a regional means nobody currently in the school has seen one won.
Two titles the record cannot describe
West Central girls have won three regionals and the IHSA holds no win-loss record for two of them. That is not a minor gap: it means a third of the programme championship history exists only as a title code. Anyone in Henderson County with results from 2005-06 or 2015-16 would be filling a real hole in the public record.
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 188-195 across 16 counted years, though three seasons are excluded from that total entirely. Coaching and schedule detail from MaxPreps team pages, retrieved September 2026. Corrections posted the same day.
