Football on the Great Plains

It's football season for high schools all across the country. In Colorado the new season provides fresh evidence of continued population loss on the Great Plains, and how rural schools and communities are adapting.

Writing for the Denver Post, Robert Sanchez tells the story of the newly combined Sedgwick County Cougars football team, which is in its first year as an athletic cooperative between Julesburg and Revere High Schools. Reaction to the new arrangement is understandably mixed.

A majority of school board members pushed for the agreement and got the backing of students and their parents.

Without the sports cooperative, they say the two school probably would have lost their football programs, driving yet another stake through the heart of rural America. ...

But allegiances die hard, and several longtime alumni from Julesburg and Revere see the freshly minted agreement as akin to kissing an ugly cousin. ...

"When you discard 100 years of history and tradition, it does get people's attention," Julesburg resident Jim Kontny wrote in a letter to the town's newspaper late last year.

It's hard for people who've never experienced rural schools first-hand to understand the importance of maintaining rural schools and all that comes with any sort of consolidation. For them the school mascot is the hardest animal to kill.

The effect of populations declines can also be seen in the change in distribution of Colorado's rural schools playing 11-man, 8-man, and 6-man football between 2005 and 2006.

1A 11-man (Colorado's smallest classification out of five)
2005: 40
2006: 36

8-man
2005: 38
2006: 49

6-man
2005: 20
2006: 22

Sedgwick County lost its first game 19-16 to Creek Valley High School (Nebraska), which is in it's third year as a consolidated school.