West Carroll, facing low numbers, to play a JV schedule this fall

When the spring 2021 football season wrapped up, the West Carroll Thunder had 21 players in uniform. Nine of them were about to graduate, nine others were freshmen. On top of that, not all of the players who could be back on the field in the fall wanted to continue playing football.

Left with what was looking to be an untenable situation, the West Carroll administration made the move to put varsity football on hold this fall, and play just a junior varsity season this year.

“So going into the fall, basically we have no participation from our junior and senior class,” West Carroll athletic director Mike Burton said. “So just looking at it from being competitive and the safety issue and developing players, we just thought it was in the best interest of the program to just play a JV schedule. Primarily we’re going to be freshmen and sophomores. I suppose if we had a junior or senior they could play, but we don’t expect there to be any.”

The Thunder will play all of their games this year on Mondays at 5:30 p.m., starting with an August 30 clash at Dakota. West Carroll will have home games September 6 against Galena, September 20 against Fulton, October 4 against Lena-Winslow, October 11 against Stockton, and October 25 against Eastland-Pearl City.

The plan now is for this to be a one-year relegation to the junior varsity ranks, while working to build the program stronger for the fall of 2022.

“I know it’s a setback and something we didn’t want to do, but we’re also looking at it as something of an opportunity to build back from the ground up,” Burton said.

To help build that up, the coaching staff is already working to build excitement in potential players about to enter seventh and eighth grades.

“We just had an athletic registration night [Thursday],” Burton said. “It was open to students and parents to come in and meet the coaches at all levels. We have been making more of a push to work with the junior high level. Our varsity coach, William Clark, he’s been working a lot with our youth coaches and the students at that level.”

Another possible future lies in 8-man football. Dwindling numbers at a lot of small schools in recent years has led to the growth of 8-man football, including among many of West Carroll’s NUIC rivals, with Polo, Milledgeville, Orangeville, Aquin, AFC and Amboy all fielding 8-man teams this fall.

Burton presented a number of different plans for the football program to the superintendent and the board, with 8-man football one of the options.

“The deadline to do so is January 1, so we’re going to assess how things go this fall and how many players we have and how many players we might have coming into high school next year, and make a decision based on that,” Burton said. “That’s something we’re kind of putting on hold right now. We’ll look at that in October or November.”