{"id":10213,"date":"2018-08-24T10:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-08-24T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=10213"},"modified":"2018-08-19T18:05:04","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T23:05:04","slug":"north-tama-the-smallest-with-11-on-the-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2018\/08\/north-tama-the-smallest-with-11-on-the-field\/","title":{"rendered":"North Tama the smallest with 11 on the field"},"content":{"rendered":"

High school football season starts Friday (for most of us, anyway) and while there are new districts, one thing is the same from 2016:<\/a> North Tama is the smallest public school playing 11 instead of 8.<\/p>\n

The BEDS numbers (total grades 9-11)<\/a> remove a previous qualifier \u2014 Le Mars Gehlen is now larger than NT. Of the nine teams with a BEDS under 120, the new cutoff for 8-man football<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 er,\u00a0Tom McDermott \u2014\u00a0is back in the director’s chair after being\u00a0inducted into the\u00a0Iowa Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame last year<\/a>. Former coach Austin Pink, who was only at NT for two years<\/a>, bolted (cough)<\/em><\/a> for a school that has much newer and way way way fancier facilities<\/a>. (Liberty’s BEDS alone is two-thirds of Class A District 7 combined<\/em>, and that district is one of the two with seven teams instead of six.)<\/p>\n

The 8-man Districts 2, 3, 4, and 5 are peppered with teams North Tama played at some point in the past 20 years \u2014 including Midland, which had a Week 0 opener<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. It was almost<\/em> 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<\/em>, but still not a picnic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","category-tama-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10213"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10216,"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10213\/revisions\/10216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}