Ohio Northeast Region defunct athletic conferences

This is a list of former high school athletic conferences in the Northeast Region of Ohio, as designated by the OHSAA.

This football-only conference featured six schools in northeastern Ohio, with some of the strongest gridiron teams in the state.

see Ashland County HS Sports Teams, Ohio The larger schools with proximity to I-76, I-71 and I-271 (Brunswick, Cloverleaf and Wadsworth) merged with Brecksville, North Royalton and Strongsville as charter members of the Pioneer Conference.

Warrensville Heights was also growing in enrollment and joined another Cleveland area league with schools closer in size.

Smaller schools like Brooklyn, Cuyahoga Heights, Independence and Lutheran West later joined the Inland Conference.

They were also near I-480, making travel among their new Inland Conference opponents easier, and their competition consisted of schools similar in enrollment.

Richmond Heights had the same city limit growth issues and left for the East Suburban Conference early on.

The differing growth patterns of these suburbs caused the quick demise of the league, as the three growing programs all left to join the original Greater Cleveland Conference in 1968, replacing Garfield Heights.

Brooklyn and Cuyahoga Heights joined in 1979/1980 and the league was divided into an East Division (Brooklyn, Buckeye, Cuyahoga Heights, Independence, Lutheran West) and a West Division (Avon, Columbia, Firelands, Keystone, South Amherst).

Avon, Firelands and Keystone left at the end of the 1985–86 school year and began play in the newly formed Lorain County Conference in the Fall of 1986.

An interest in joining the league was expressed by Hamilton, Middletown, Springfield, and Toledo Libbey in 1949, but those schools ultimately decided the travel was too much for them to consider as well.

(1977–2007) This conference's growth was the result of major changes due such as population growth/shift, proximity to interstate corridors and the potential for greater natural border rivalries .

During the 1980s Wadsworth, a member with strong athletic programs despite smaller enrollment, left for the Suburban League where opponents along the US-224 and I-76/I-94 corridors made better natural border rivalries.

Cloverleaf followed suit in the late 1990s due to stagnation in its enrollment and its inability to maintain its programs at competitive levels in the PC.

Conversely, Medina, also along the corridor, joined the PC in 1986 because of its unprecedented growth and the greater natural border rivalries among the league's charter members.