Princeville Princes Girls Basketball: 2026-27 Schedule and History
Princeville Princes · Princeville, Illinois · Lincoln Trail Conference
Coach: John Gross · 2025-26: 18-14 · All-time: 707-556 (.560)
John Gross has won more than seventy per cent of his games at Princeville across ten seasons. The programme has still never won a sectional championship in fifty years.
The Gross era
Since taking over in 2016-17, Gross has gone 218-87 — a .715 record — including seasons of 30-5, 30-5 and 30-4.
Three thirty-win seasons at a Class 1A school is a considerable achievement, and it produced regional titles in 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2019-20. It has not produced a sectional.
The last three years have levelled off: 18-13, 18-15, 18-14. Remarkably consistent, and some way below the peak.
The full record
Regional titles (5): 1981-82, 1987-88, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2019-20.
Sectional titles: none. State finals: none. The Place column is empty in every row across fifty seasons.
Two regionals in the 1980s, three under Gross, and nothing in the twenty-eight years between 1988 and 2016.
The Princeville pattern
Set the three programmes side by side and the school’s situation is unusually clear.
| Programme | All-time | Regionals | Sectionals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boys basketball | 1,411-844 | 12 | 1 |
| Volleyball | 503-362-3 | 8 | 0 |
| Girls basketball | 707-556 | 5 | 0 |
Twenty-five regional championships across the three. One sectional, won by the boys in 1984-85. Princeville are very good at winning the first round of the postseason and have almost never won the second.
A record book that works
Worth noting because it is rare in this conference: Princeville’s girls filing is current through 2025-26, with only a single blank row in fifty seasons — 1992-93, which carries a coach named Jones and no record.
Compare that to ROWVA, whose last real figure is 2015-16, or Knoxville, whose file stops at 2021-22. When we quote 707-556 for Princeville, it is a number we can stand behind.
A note on the nickname
MaxPreps and the IHSA both use “Princes” for the girls teams as well as the boys. Whether the school itself uses “Princesses” locally is something we have not been able to confirm, and we would rather ask than guess — if you know what the girls teams are actually called in Princeville, tell us and we will use it.
2026-27 schedule
Around eleven games are posted for 2026-27. 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 Princeville online
Princeville, Illinois competes for search results with Princeville, Hawaii, a resort town on Kauai that dominates the name online. There is also Princeville, North Carolina. The Illinois village has about 1,700 people and sits in Peoria County, roughly thirty miles east of Galesburg. Adding “Princes” or “Illinois” is what reaches the school.
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.
What we are still chasing
- What the girls teams are called locally
- The full 2026-27 schedule and roster
- March 2027 state series dates and assignments
The school and the conference
Princeville CUSD 326 serves about 1,700 people in northern Peoria County, thirty miles east of Galesburg. It sits at the eastern edge of the Lincoln Trail Conference, which means longer trips west to Monmouth and Biggsville than most of its rivals face.
The school competes in Class 1A across most sports. Its enrolment is comparable to Annawan, Galva and Stark County — the group of small schools that make up the core of this conference.
Where the sectional round has gone wrong
Five regional titles, five exits at the sectional. It is worth being precise about what that means, because “never won a sectional” can sound like a fluke of scheduling rather than a pattern.
In Class 1A, the sectional round is where the small schools that dominated their own regionals meet each other. For Princeville that has meant running into the strongest programmes in this half of the state at exactly the wrong moment — the same wall that Knoxville have hit eleven times and Bureau Valley five.
Among area girls programmes, only four have ever won a sectional: Galesburg, Wethersfield, Annawan and Abingdon-Avon. Annawan turned theirs into two state championships. Everyone else in the conference is still waiting, and Princeville — with 707 wins and a coach at .715 — is the most conspicuous of them.
Where Princeville Princes rank in the area
Across the fourteen girls basketball programmes we cover, Princeville Princes sit fourth by all-time wins (707), eighth by winning percentage (.560) and sixth by regional championships (five).
The nearest programmes by wins are Annawan Bravettes above (808) and Knoxville Blue Bullets below (688).
The sectional round is the wall. Princeville Princes have won five regional titles and lost the sectional every time — five 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 | 1,263 |
| Recorded seasons | 50 |
| Average wins per season | 14.1 |
| Average games per season | 25 |
| Regional titles | 5 |
| Share of all area regionals | 4.5% |
| Years since last regional | 6 |
6 years since the last regional puts Princeville in the middle of the area — recent enough to be remembered, long enough to matter.
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 707-556 across 50 years. Coaching and schedule detail from MaxPreps team pages, retrieved September 2026. Corrections posted the same day.
