St. Andrew’s-Sewanee has decided to join the Middle Tennessee Athletic Conference and begin playing eight-man football starting with the 2011 season.
“I think we realized [need for a change] at the beginning of the year when our roster topped out at 19,” SAS athletic director and football coach Ellis Mayfield said. “The low- to mid-20s is what we have had [on the roster] consistently.”
The school will continue its TSSAA affiliation in 12 other sports. However, the football affiliation is at an end because the Mountain Lions have forfeited one game and will forfeit their final two contests because they are down to 11 healthy players.
“We had to forfeit the game with Franklin Road Academy and hoped to have enough healthy players to compete in the last two games,” Mayfield said, “but it became obvious that a week off was not enough for some of the injuries to heal. We hate to break our commitment to fellow region schools, but we could not play our final games safely.”
SAS will be the eighth member of the MTAC.
“We have had an open invitation for a couple of years,” Mayfield said. “We have 93 boys in the high school, and 20 of those are international students. For the most part the number pool has declined although there was interest. We had seven returning seniors and I felt we could be competitive. We just didn’t get the supporting cast this year.”
Mayfield never has coached eight-man football, and he hasn’t decided whether he’ll coach the team or bring in someone familiar with eight-man strategies.
“I’ll have to put on the athletic director’s hat and see what is the best approach to take. You want to determine what’s best for the players and the program,” he said. “The basics are the same, but there are obviously some strategic differences.”
Those strategies were obvious in a game that MTAC member Aaron Academy played on Oct. 8 against Franklin Christian. Aaron Academy rushed for 603 yards in a 92-54 victory.
It doesn’t appear that any Chattanooga-area schools are interested in joining SAS.
Arts & Sciences has a co-op agreement with Tyner, and Patriots athletic director Mark Dragoo feels that is about as far as the school ever will take its football interests.
“We probably won’t consider it. I don’t know that we would have enough guys,” Dragoo said. “If you look at our junior class as an example, 65 percent are girls. So much depends on how many students apply and how many kids are coming in.
“[Tyner] Coach [Wayne] Turner has been gracious enough to help us out, but I think we’ve only had a couple to start over the last three years. The co-op is about as deep as we’ll get into football.”
Lookout Valley has survived and thrived recently under coach Tony Webb, but the Yellow Jackets have had numbers woes this season, sinking as low as 15 game-ready players.
“We had fewer kids to start the season,” Webb said. “Normally we’ll have 30 or so as opposed to the 22 or 23 we started with this year. Still, I don’t think our administration or our community would want us to do [eight-man football], although that’s a decision that would be made by somebody in administration above my level.”
Webb pointed out that Lookout Valley’s enrollment (212) is similar to that of perennial winner South Pittsburg (235).
“Football means a lot to the people in South Pittsburg. It’s a football community,” he said. “We have several really good athletes in school who, for whatever reason, aren’t playing football. They could have made a difference.”