North Tama has never lost to Gladbrook-Reinbeck in football — but the neighboring schools haven’t played each other in a decade. That’s about to change as part of the old North Iowa Cedar League is reunited in the new Class A District 4. District assignments were released today. (PDF)
There’s a bit of the South Iowa Cedar League in there too with Belle Plaine and Iowa Valley. (The NICL and SICL are for everything except football, but NT and GMG have both migrated to the Iowa Star Conference.) It’s NT’s most geographically compact football district in years.
In that hiatus, NT won a state championship and GR played in one.
GR and BCLUW are both coming down from Class 1A, while two of last year’s opponents, Central of Elkader and Valley of Elgin, are going down to 8-man. In fact, of the 16 teams in 8-man Districts 3 and 4, North Tama played half of them in the past decade.
The hidden story overall is the continued fall of the smallest of the small. Of the nine schools that made up Class A District 3 in 2004-05, all but Postville will be playing 8-man football in 2012-13, including NU High, whose home games are in the UNI-Dome. There are now 70 teams in that classification.
As of now, the North Tama-Central game at Elkader last year was the last 11-man game played in the Clayton County seat. It was an NT shutout.
Also of note, Class 4A is now broken into districts without relation to geography.