High school football season starts Friday (for most of us, anyway) and while there are new districts, one thing is the same from 2016: North Tama is the smallest public school playing 11 instead of 8.
The BEDS numbers (total grades 9-11) remove a previous qualifier — Le Mars Gehlen is now larger than NT. Of the nine teams with a BEDS under 120, the new cutoff for 8-man football, four of them are private schools. Two, NT and GMG, both in Class A District 7, are the only teams in the Iowa Star Conference playing 11.
Oh, and North Tama has a new football coach, who was a previous football coach, and it was a comparatively last-minute thing. Mr. McDermott — er, Tom McDermott — is back in the director’s chair after being inducted into the Iowa Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame last year. Former coach Austin Pink, who was only at NT for two years, bolted (cough) for a school that has much newer and way way way fancier facilities. (Liberty’s BEDS alone is two-thirds of Class A District 7 combined, and that district is one of the two with seven teams instead of six.)
The 8-man Districts 2, 3, 4, and 5 are peppered with teams North Tama played at some point in the past 20 years — including Midland, which had a Week 0 opener, has its 40-yard line at center field, and was my excuse for polishing off serious chunks of IA 38 and IA 64 in 2007.
District 5 is where Gladbrook-Reinbeck will experience its first year at 8, along with Baxter and Collins-Maxwell who now get official status and will have to play each other. It was almost geographically compact except that Twin Cedars and Melcher-Dallas are involved, and there seriously is no good way to get from Ackley to Bussey. There’s a gravel gap of S62 in Marshall County that would make it straighter, but still not a picnic.