Campuses are 2 miles apart. The school has shuttles. I'm sure the older kids are able to drive themselves.
Iowa High School BEDS count 24-25
- Thread starter qwerty
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What I have seen is the schools want to keep their own football identity, which they think is better than being in a shared program. What they do not want is to be gobbled up by one school and lose that identity that has lasted for years. SK changed the school mascot and use both school colors in their uniforms to show that each school is being represented in the merger, but like I stated they still have problems. The wrong way to do it was like NL/Danville the kids and parents just could not get over the rivalry between the schools to make it work, the Danville kids wore blue socks showing everyone that they were not from NL but Danville. The sharing program was doomed from the start because each wanted their own school to be represented.
8-man football has a place in Iowa, but they need to lower the number of schools that are allowed to play or split it up into 2 classes, because there is way too many schools like SEW, Twin Cedars that have 30/40 kids out, more than enough to play 11 man, but stay at 8 man to get further in the playoffs.
Twin Cedars has won 5 games in the last 5 years. 2 of those were against Woodward Academy and 2 were against Seymour.
Looking at the bed count numbers really serves as another reminder that the western 1/3 of Iowa is dying. A lot of these districts are already quite large mileage wise and thy are running out of viable consolidation options too.
Most of that is because of the district that they have played in, lot harder to get victories playing Monty, Belle Plain and Collin Maxwell, then the good old days of Seymour, Trail, and Melcher. They have qualified for the playoffs regularly until the current stretch. TC should have never been allowed to play 8 man football with the number of kids they had out some of those years.
The flip side of that is would they have those numbers out if they had to play 11 man football?
That is certainly a factor when it comes to football. When you have two teams in the same classification but one sideline has double the kids then I'd say it's something that needs addressed.
I think one solution is to recognize that sometimes it just doesn’t work and someone might not get to play high school football. If a school wants to play at that deficit, great, because it should be about playing not about winning at all costs at the high school level. If a school thinks that’s so unfair and they aren’t going to play because they might not win then just shut it down because the learning and growing has ended at that point.
Would you rather have 20 kids on the sidelines or 4? Some of these schools have 15 kids out for football and are playing teams with 35 or more. So yes, number of kids playing makes a huge difference in how good the team can be.
When I was at Harmony, in the office one day, the secretary ask me to take a call from the AD from Twin Cedars, he wanted to know if we could schedule them in a JV game, I told him that we only had 15 kids out a couple of them were girls and did not have a JV team. When I asked him how many kids TC had he told me over 35. So ya, it makes a huge difference how many kids you have on the sidelines. Kids are going to get hurt, become academically ineligible to play, would you rather choose that next kid from the 4 or 5 you have standing there or the 20 you have?
Yes they would or they would not be able to field a team. Seymour looked to sharing with Morman Trail a few years ago, they had about 13 to 15 kids that said they wanted to play football, but only 3 or 4 would play if they were sharing with Trail.
The kids wanted to play for their own school team, and would rather not win games just to play for that school. I thought they were crazy, go to Trail and win some games, the coaches thought the same way, but they ended up trying to field their own team and did not win a game.
Should 2A/3A/4A schools with only 30 kids on varsity be forced to play down a class?
If a school has 25 boys, and all 25 want to play football, good for them. Why should they be punished?
Truthfully using number of kids in the program would be the best way to classify the teams. Use a five year average of number of players, would be much better than using your BEDs numbers because it would even up the schools.
First you implied that numbers did not matter when in fact numbers is one of the most important factors in the success of most teams. Teams that win get kids to go out for the sport, teams that lose do not, it's that simple. You have to have talent, then numbers, the two go together, its hard to win games unless you have both.
That's quite a take there. Football, more so than any other sport your numbers matter. I haven't been to watch a game between one of the DSM metro schools and one of the suburban schools but when a SEP or a Waukee NW rolls up for a Freshman game with 80 or 90 kids playing against a Freshman team with 25 kids that's a serious mismatch. Now I don't know what the answer should be here. Maybe it's introducing a promotion/relegation system like European soccer or you start capping the roster and or coaching staff sizes by class.
I don’t disagree it’s a mismatch in terms of affecting the outcome. It doesn’t affect those 25 kids wanting to play a football game regardless of the outcome. If it’s a health concern then it’s a health concern and the answer is pretty easy at that point.
I agree that teams should be able to find a game wherever they want. Shouldn’t matter what the total enrollment of a school is or what “class” a team is in.
I guess we shouldn't really be foreign to the concept of having only 3-7 guys on the field for a team. After All, that's basically how Iowa's offense works.
Sure, it affects them, kids want a chance to win, and are not going to play when they know that they are going to not only lose but be destroyed in these games. You are always going to get kids that will play no matter what, but you need those other kids that will play because the team is winning. If the team is not winning, those other kids are not going to go out. It's easy to go out a Valley or SEP, all your friends are on the team, and you are going to win games, that is not the case at East or Roosevelt. The kids know they have no chance and are not going to put in the time because they see it as a lost cause.
