Lincoln Trail Conference: Schools, Divisions and How Football Works

The Lincoln Trail Conference is a small-school IHSA athletic conference in west-central Illinois, founded in 1976 and now in its 51st year. It has fourteen member schools across seven counties, and almost everything published about it online is at least two years out of date — including its own members list, Wikipedia’s, and MaxPreps’.

This page is our attempt at a current, accurate reference. If you spot something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

Which schools are in the Lincoln Trail Conference?

Fourteen, as the IHSA listed them in its conference register updated 28 August 2026. The IHSA uses the formal school name with the town first, which is why some of these look unfamiliar — the everyday name is in brackets.

School	Town	County	Mascot
Abingdon (A.-Avon)	Abingdon	Knox	Tornadoes
Annawan	Annawan	Henry	Braves
Biggsville (West Central)	Biggsville	Henderson	Heat
Cambridge	Cambridge	Henry	Vikings
Galva	Galva	Henry	Wildcats
Kewanee (Wethersfield)	Kewanee	Henry	Flying Geese
Knoxville	Knoxville	Knox	Blue Bullets
Manlius (Bureau Valley)	Manlius	Bureau	Storm
Monmouth (United)	Monmouth	Warren	Red Storm
Oneida (ROWVA)	Oneida	Knox	Tigers
Princeville	Princeville	Peoria	Princes
Toulon (Stark County)	Toulon	Stark	Rebels
Williamsfield	Williamsfield	Knox	Bombers
Woodhull (AlWood)	Woodhull	Henry	Aces

Henry County has five members and Knox County four; those two are the conference’s centre of gravity. The other five sit in Bureau, Henderson, Peoria, Stark and Warren.

Why you will see “thirteen” and “fourteen” and “twelve”

All three numbers are correct, depending on what is being counted, and this trips up every source including ours.

• Fourteen is the number of IHSA member schools, because AlWood and Cambridge are two separate schools.
• Thirteen is the number of athletic programmes, because AlWood and Cambridge compete together as the Ridgewood Spartans, a co-operative agreement dating from 2009. The conference’s own site lists them on one line, which is why it shows thirteen.
• Twelve turns up in some sport-specific standings, usually because a school did not field a team that season. Annawan had no girls basketball team in the winter of 2025-26, for instance.

Two other co-ops matter when you are reading a schedule. Annawan-Wethersfield combines Annawan and Wethersfield of Kewanee. ROWVA-Williamsfield combines ROWVA, itself based in Oneida, with Williamsfield. In both cases the two schools remain separate IHSA members but field one team in most sports.

Football is a different league — and its name changed

This is the part that causes the most confusion, and the part most sources get wrong.

The Lincoln Trail Conference does not run its own football league. Since the autumn of 2023 its football programmes have competed in the Lincoln Land Conference, a football-only league formed by combining the football operations of the Lincoln Trail and Prairieland conferences. Both parent conferences continue to exist and run independently in every other sport.

If you have seen the league called “Lincoln Trail-Prairieland”, with Large School and Small School divisions, that is the 2023-2025 arrangement under a name the league itself never used. MaxPreps still carries it, and requesting the current season on those pages serves content last updated in March 2025. We had it wrong on this page too until October 2026.

The 2026 realignment: three divisions, not two

For the 2026 season the league dropped the Large and Small divisions, which had been assigned by enrollment, in favour of three geographic divisions — North, South and West — across seventeen teams. The stated aim was to pair schools with others closer in both size and travel distance.

North (6) — every one of them a Lincoln Trail school: Annawan-Wethersfield, Bureau Valley, Knoxville, Princeville, ROWVA-Williamsfield, Stark County.

South (6): Abingdon-Avon and Monmouth United from Lincoln Trail, plus Havana, Rushville-Industry, South Fulton and L-V-C.

West (5): Farmington, Macomb, Elmwood/Brimfield and Illini West from Prairieland, plus West Hancock.

One detail nobody else seems to have written down: “Lincoln Trail plus Prairieland” does not actually describe the membership. Two of the seventeen — Hamilton, which plays as West Hancock, and Rushville-Industry — belong to the West Central Conference for every other sport. The football league draws on three conferences, not two.

Three member schools are not in it at all

West Central of Biggsville, Ridgewood and Galva play eight-man football and are absent from the Lincoln Land Conference entirely. West Central moved to eight-man for the 2020 season after a unanimous board vote in December 2019; Ridgewood followed for 2022; Galva also plays eight-man.

All three remain full Lincoln Trail Conference members in every other sport. Their football league is the Central West conference of the Illinois 8-Man Football Association, alongside Bushnell-Prairie City. Eight-man is not an IHSA state-series sport — the IHSA publishes eight-player conference schedules, but there is no IHSA eight-man state championship, and the association runs its own structure.

How competitive is the Lincoln Trail Conference?

It is a genuine small-school league. Every member is Class 1A in football and predominantly Class A or 1A elsewhere, with the largest members reaching 2A in some sports. Williamsfield is among the smallest high schools in the state; the biggest members sit under 400.

The most honest answer, though, is that the conference’s central challenge is roster size rather than quality of opposition. Three of its fourteen schools can no longer field eleven-man football. Three more survive in eleven-man only through co-operatives. When the football merger was announced in 2023, Stark County’s coach framed it explicitly as a way to keep small programmes from drifting to eight-man.

That said, the results are there:

• Stark County won the Class 1A girls 4×800 relay at the 2026 state finals, running down the leaders on the anchor leg. That is the conference’s most recent state title.
• Annawan won Class 1A girls basketball state championships in 2013-14 and 2016-17, finished third in 2012-13, and were boys basketball state runners-up in 2017-18.
• Wethersfield won the Class 1A football state championship in 2001-02.
• Stark County have been Class 1A football state runners-up three times, in 1997-98, 2008-09 and 2015-16.
• Annawan-Wethersfield reached the Class 1A football quarterfinals in 2025, losing to eventual champions Lena-Winslow.
• Five Lincoln Land schools made the 2025 Class 1A football field in a single season.

We have deliberately not published a complete conference title list. We verified these against IHSA records pages school by school, and we have not yet done that for every member. We would rather have six confirmed entries than fifteen half-checked ones. One note while we are here: Wikipedia credits Stark County with eight state championships in team athletics but lists none of them, and the IHSA’s own records page for Toulon shows no first-place team finishes. We are not repeating that figure.

Recent membership changes

• 2021 — Abingdon-Avon and Knoxville joined, both from the Prairieland Conference.
• 2023 — football operations merged with Prairieland to form the Lincoln Land Conference.
• 2024 — Bureau Valley joined from the Three Rivers Athletic Conference, and Mercer County of Aledo left for the Three Rivers Athletic Conference. Effectively a straight swap. Mercer County’s athletic director described it as a return to historic rivalries after eighteen years apart.
• 2026 — the football league restructured into three geographic divisions.

Wikipedia still lists Mercer County as a current member. It has not been one since the 2024-25 school year. We have found no announced moves beyond 2026-27, though that is an absence of evidence rather than a confirmed “nothing is planned.”

Not to be confused with

“Lincoln Trail” is a crowded name in Illinois, and the search results mix several unrelated things together.

• Lincoln Trail College — a public community college in Robinson, in Crawford County on the Indiana border, founded 1969 and part of the Illinois Eastern Community Colleges system. Its teams are the Statesmen and it competes in the Great Rivers Athletic Conference in NJCAA Region 24. It is in the opposite corner of the state and has no connection whatever to this conference.
• Lincoln Land Community College — in Springfield, teams called the Loggers. Unrelated to the high school Lincoln Land Conference, despite now sharing a name with it.
• The Lincoln Prairie Conference — a genuinely different IHSA conference, formed in 2019, based in central and east-central Illinois around Douglas, Piatt, Moultrie and Coles counties. Seventeen schools including Arcola, Arthur, Cerro Gordo, Sullivan and Villa Grove. Zero overlap with Lincoln Trail.
• The Prairieland Conference — our football partner, a separate all-sports conference formed in 1982 covering Fulton, Knox, Mason, McDonough, Peoria, Schuyler and Warren counties.
• West Central is a three-way trap. West Central of Biggsville, the Heat, is a Lincoln Trail member. West Central of Winchester, the Cougars, is a different school in a different part of the state. The West Central Conference is a separate conference again, around Quincy and Adams County — and Biggsville’s West Central is not in it.

A little history

The conference was founded in 1976 by Alexis, AlWood, Cambridge, Galva, ROVA, Toulon-LaFayette, Wethersfield and Winola. Consolidations reshaped it steadily: Toulon-LaFayette and Wyoming became Stark County in 1992; Alexis and Warren consolidated into United in 2004, with Yorkwood joining them in 2007; Aledo and Westmer became Mercer County in 2009.

Worth knowing for context on the current arrangement: this is the second time the conference has outsourced its football. From 2006 to 2009 its football programmes played in the “West Prairie Trail” mega-conference before returning in 2010. The Lincoln Land arrangement is unusual, but it is not unprecedented.

How we cover it

We keep a permanent page for each area programme, updated the morning after each round with the latest result, the current record and the next fixture. For the current football season see our IHSA playoff projections, which tracks where every area side stands.

Where the information here comes from

Membership is taken from the IHSA’s own conference register, updated 28 August 2026, which is the most current and authoritative list available — more so than Wikipedia, which is roughly two years behind, and more so than MaxPreps, which runs one to two seasons behind on football and still uses the old league name. The 2026 division alignment is confirmed independently by Shaw Local, by a Peoria-area standings roundup and by a member school’s own football site.

We have not published enrollment figures. The ones circulating are undated and conflict with each other by 50 to 100 students per school, and we would rather print nothing than print those.

Neighbouring leagues: the Prairieland Conference, our partner in the Lincoln Land football league, and the Western Big 6, where Galesburg plays.

Send us corrections

If you are an athletic director, coach or parent and something here is wrong or out of date, tell us. Conference membership and division alignments change more often than anyone outside the schools realises, and we would rather be corrected than be the next stale page.