Small Town Football

[CAB]

Hello all,

I don't post here much anymore, just mostly scroll and read. But I found something I think is worth sharing and that might be of interest to fellow sports nerds. I'd seen this article shared on Facebook a few times and decided to take a look today. It's a very interesting piece on the disappearance of small town football in the state of Nebraska. It doesn't sound like the most exciting topic, but I wanted to share this with those of you that come from bigger high school backgrounds and maybe don't understand the scale of just how small a small school can be. I myself live in a small town in Nebraska (pop ~1,000), but even I didn't fully realize the scale of things when it gets down to the lower classes of high school football. My school is average size for our area, at around 400 students in K-12. Most Nebraska schools have your standard 11-man teams, and quite a few play 8-man. Then there are 15 schools that play 6-man. This story follows one of the 6-man teams in the state, playing their final games ever before merging with another nearby school. Anyway, I just thought I'd share this and try to give people perspective on how small of a scale some schools operate in Nebraska. The link is below:

http://dataomaha.com/media/sports/high-schools/football/the-disappearance-of-high-school-football/#the-disappearance-of-small-town-football

[Cola]

I will check this out later.

Small town guy here myself- graduated with 50 people in my class, around 270 in the school total.

We played 11 man football in the smallest public school classification- but we had a lot of 8-man team school in the area (all private schools). People never really took the private schools seriously in football...but from what I understand, that is a bit different up North.

[CAB]

I will check this out later.

Small town guy here myself- graduated with 50 people in my class, around 270 in the school total.

We played 11 man football in the smallest public school classification- but we had a lot of 8-man team school in the area (all private schools). People never really took the private schools seriously in football...but from what I understand, that is a bit different up North.

Funny that you would say that about private schools. In Nebraska, private schools definitely see their fair share of success. We have 6 levels of classification and most of the private schools fall somewhere in the middle/lower classes. So we have catholic schools drawing from a population base of say, 25,000+ that are competing against towns of 1,000-5,000. It's not uncommon to see a good player on a mediocre public school team transfer to the nearest private school. It's not exactly "recruiting" as some would say, but private schools definitely have an advantage.

Our classes go as follows:

Class A (almost entirely Omaha/Lincoln metro schools)

Class B (large public schools, a few private)

Class C1 (smaller towns/private schools)

Class C2 (smaller towns/private schools)

Class D1 (very small towns)

Class D2 (very small towns)

D1 and D2 play 8-man, and anything below that is 6-man.

[Jimmy!]

Had no idea six-man football existed. Interesting. Small-school graduate here. My school played 11-played football. I do remember those 8-man squads always played tougher. Something about having to adjust from 11 to 8 that gave the other school an advantage.

On a side note, I remember playing basketball against a public school with an enrollment of 21 in Ukiah, Oregon. Those small schools were always full of surprises.

[GriffinM6]

Wow it's so weird hearing that there's teams like that only have 8 and even 6 guys on the field. In Georgia even the smallest schools have 300 students on average, so you never hear about schools here having 6 or 8 man teams.

[kwmoore]

This ought to blow your mind, Griffinmarlins....about 10 miles from where I am is a little bitty town/Hamlet/whatever called Rochelle. K-12 are all in the same building, etc, etc. A few years back, the girls track team sent one participant to the state finals. She competed in five events. She won three event AND the state team title. That's small town!

[CAB]

I play high school basketball and last night we played in what has got to be one of the smallest remaining gyms in the state. It looks like a machine shed from the outside and there's five rows on either side of the court. Apparently it used to also serve as the school cafeteria and had tile floors, but they've since upgraded to this weird rubbery linoleum. Here's the best pic I could find:

[kwmoore]

This looks like it might have been a WW II airplane hanger once upon a time.