The Lakeshore Conference was formed in 1997 during a period of realignment among high school athletic conferences in Wisconsin. The five public high schools (Badger, Union Grove, Waterford, Westosha Central and Wilmot Union) were all former members of the Eastern Division of the Southern Lakes Conference, which was dissolved that year. The sixth member of the Eastern Division, Burlington, would go on to join the Southeast Conference.[1] The two private high schools (St. Catherine's in Racine and St. Joseph in Kenosha) were former members of the Metro Conference, which had been affiliated with the Wisconsin Independent Schools Athletic Association.[2] In 1997, WISAA began a merger process with the WIAA that would be finished for the 2000-01 school year, which was the main catalyst for the Metro Conference's ending.[3] The Lakeshore Conference maintained the same seven-member roster during the entirety of its eleven-year existence. In 2008, the five public high schools returned to the Southern Lakes Conference in a reversal of the realignment that had occurred eleven years earlier.[4] That same year, St. Catherine's and St. Joseph both joined the Midwest Classic Conference, and both were part of a group of eight schools that split off from the conference to create the Metro Classic Conference in 2012.[5]
