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HARTINGTON – A Hartington man has changed the face of eight-man football in Nebraska.
Hartington-Newcastle High School Principal Corey Uldrich has been working on getting eight-man football expanded for over a decade, now.
Uldrich, a long-time high school football coach and referee, has been frustrated that every year there are always several good teams barred from competing in the playoffs because their enrollments are too large.
Currently, a school must have 47 or fewer boys in grades 10-12 in order to be eligible to compete in the playoffs.
A proposal he and Lee Schneider of Clarkson/Leigh and Isaac Frecks of Alma submitted to the Nebraska School Activities Association Board of Directors was approved last week by a 5-3 vote of the NSAA Board of Directors. The new plan will take effect beginning with the 2025-26 school year.
It raises the cut-off number to 55 and adds a third class of schools for eightman football. Each class would then only have 16 teams qualify for playoffs, for a total of 48 eight-man teams in the playoffs. The shortened playoff schedule would then allow for all eight-man teams to play a nine-game regular season, just as the 11-man six-man teams do now.
The change was long overdue Uldrich said. 'I think many people who are involved with football in Nebraska can tell you we have some issues to get worked out, and one of them has been how do we avoid having all of the ineligible eight-man teams,' Uldrich said. 'When I did a study of the states around us and the number they use to determine the largest eight-man schools, Nebraska was below our neighbors, and in some cases, by quite a bit. So, I felt like moving the number up was something we needed to do to give more kids the opportunity to play postseason football.'
This proposal protects the smallest eight-man schools by giving them their own class, Uldrich said.
'So even though this is going to allow bigger schools the chance to play eightman football, we finally got the support of the smallest eight-man schools because they knew they would be protected from playing them (the larger schools) in the postseason with the addition of a third class,' he said.
Uldrich said he sees two potential outcomes with this new provision. 'The one that is most obvious, and frankly the reason the proposal was written, is that you're going to see less schools ineligible for the playoffs at the eight-man level,' he said. 'Moving the eligibility number up to 55 will make more schools eligible, and we will see growth in the eight-man game at the top end of our classification. The second outcome, that I would anticipate we'll see, is some of the largest six-man schools come back to the eight-man game. If they know, again, that they have a third class that will be just for the smallest eight-man schools, I believe you'll see some growth at the bottom end of the eight-man game.'
Until the official enrollment figures used for determining classifications come in, it is not known how this new proposal will affect Cedar County schools.
'If I were guessing, and it's just a guess at this point, you're going to see Wynot and Randolph in the smallest class (D3). I would imagine that Hartington-Newcastle and LCC will both be in the biggest class (D1), but both could fall into D2 depending on what happens at the top of the class,' Uldrich said.
It is unclear at this time, where the State title games for the new Class D3 will be held. Currently, all 11-man and eight-man State title games are played in Memorial Stadium on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus over a twoday period. NU officials have told the NSAA the stadium cannot be available for a third day of finals.
