Danville, near Burlington, forfeited half of its football games in 2016. Last year, it did a last-minute deal to participate with West Burlington/Notre Dame (itself one of the weirder sharing setups in Iowa). Despite only having 27 players out for football last year, overall enrollment is too big for the Bears to go 8-player.
Last school year, Danville looked for a future participation partner — but neighboring New London is doing 8-player near the upper limit. Danville had to set up a deal with Mount Pleasant instead. KILJ radio covered the December 2017 school board meeting when that deal was agreed to.
(As an aside, New London’s football district area is huge, covering every 8-player school south of I-80 and east of US 63. All of them except New London spent time in a district with North Tama in the 2000s, including five of the ten in 2004-05 Class A District 5.)
Also last December, Clarksville and North Butler set up a football sharing agreement. This is advantageous to both schools because North Butler had to forfeit some games late in the season because of player injuries, and now the combined team will be able to play 11 again, in Class 1A.
The Clarksville Star story says the team will be North Butler/Clarksville. That’s right, NBC … while, if they’d done it 15 years ago with Allison-Bristow, it would have been ABC.