Rollie Wiebers, the longtime athletic director at Charter Oak-Ute, sat in his office in the fall of 1996 when his phone rang. On the other end was AJ Hjelle, then the superintendent at Elk Horn-Kimballton. He had an idea that would change the Iowa high school sports landscape.

“How do you feel about 8-player football?” Hjelle asked.

Back then, small enrollment had Charter Oak-Ute struggling to field a football team. The school paired with Dunlap, but Wiebers recalls only six kids making the 20-minute trip each day for practice. The thought of jump-starting the school’s own program again was intriguing.

“I thought it was a great idea,” Wiebers says now. “We tried to share football, and that wasn’t really working.”

The ripple effects of that phone call are still being felt all these years later.

The 2019 Iowa high school football season, which begins in earnest with Week 1 this Friday, marks the 22nd year of 8-player football after the Iowa High School Athletic Association reinstated it as a sanctioned sport in 1998. Two years later, the sport was officially added to the postseason, meaning this year’s 8-player state champ will be the 20th in state history.

The decision to bring 8-player football back — it was dropped in the early 1960s for unknown reasons — allowed the state’s smallest schools to play a smaller version of the sport. Over time, 8-player has become something of a savior for those school with shrinking enrollments, as the state’s population is leaving rural Iowa and moving to the cities.

Today, there are 66 8-player programs across Iowa, the largest share of any of Iowa's six football classes. To qualify for 8-player, schools must have a ninth-through-11th-grade enrollment of 120 students or fewer. Schools with a 9-11 enrollment larger than 120 must play 11-player (but schools who qualify for 8-player can still field 11-player teams if they wish).

Wiebers, who became the Charter Oak-Ute superintendent in 2004 and retired last spring, did not imagine his talk with Hjelle would become what it is today. They simply wanted to help their own communities, but helped many more. When Wiebers goes to check scores Friday nights, he always scans the 8-player results first.

“We never envisioned that it would get to 60-some teams,” Wiebers says. “But the other thing it’s done is create opportunities for kids in so many other areas. Cheerleading, band, team managers, and just getting those communities together on Friday nights in the fall.

“It’s helped so many groups of people, more than we could’ve ever imagined.”

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‘Wow, that looks a little weird’

At the time of the call, Hjelle was trying to solve his own football problem. Elk Horn-Kimballton co-opted with Walnut, a 20-minute drive away down state highways. Hjelle says only eight kids from his school made the drive during their final year of the sharing agreement.

Around the state, football numbers had dropped considerably. During the 1986-87 academic year, 22,900 athletes from 430 schools played football in Iowa, according to statistics kept by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). In 1996-97, only 20,538 athletes and 354 schools still played.

So Hjelle brainstormed with Chris Herrick, then Elk Horn-Kimballton’s principal, for ways to combat the issue. Hjelle graduated from Sigourney in 1962, but remembered hearing that Delta, a tiny school just south, played 8-player before Sigourney absorbed the district. He also saw that Elk Horn played 8-player in the 1950s, highlighted by Wayne Hald’s all-state season in 1959.

“I was somewhat familiar with the concept, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a game,” Hjelle says now. “Many schools co-opted, so the idea of 8-player wasn’t very pertinent. We told the state that we’d still like to try it, and they said, ‘Go ahead,’ and away we went.”

Hjelle called Wiebers, who was on board. Wiebers immediately reached out to neighboring states with questions. He looked to Nebraska, which, in 1996, had both 8-player (122 schools, 3,107 participants) and 6-player (21 and 346). To this day, no state houses more 8-player programs than the Cornhusker State, with 121 schools and 3,122 participants last year, per the NFHS.

That fall, Wiebers drove an hour to Walthill, just over the Nebraska border, to watch an 8-player game for the first time.

“I was like, 'Wow, that looks a little weird with six less players out there,'” he says. “But once you got used to that, it’s still the same game. You block, you tackle, you run, all the same things. We came back excited about it.”

Wiebers and Hjelle called other small Iowa schools to gauge interest. They held meetings at the Pizza King in Council Bluffs to share their thoughts. They hoped to recruit the entire Corner Conference, made up of teams in southwest Iowa. Some were intrigued, but many more were hesitant because of the 11-player tradition.

Their short-term goal was to find enough schools to build a schedule. When they approached the association a year later, six teams had signed on: Walnut, Whiting, Charter Oak-Ute, Elk Horn-Kimballton, Exira, and Sentral (Fenton). Other schools around the state still weren’t sold on the 8-player game, but a huge vote of confidence came from a coaching icon.

“I remember Ed Thomas, the famous coach from Aplington-Parkersburg, came up to me during a break,” Hjelle says, “and he said to me, ‘I think this 8-player idea is great. Anything that gets kids playing football is a really good thing.’”

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Those six teams made up the inaugural 8-player class for the 1998 season. The association dubbed them the “Iowa 8-Man Conference.” Everybody played everybody twice. The state association didn’t sponsor an 8-player postseason, but Elk Horn-Kimballton went 9-0 and won by an average score of 51-12. After just eight players played while co-opting, 25 came out for 8-player.

“There was a lot of scoring,” Hjelle says. “Everybody said it was going to be like arena football, and it’s just not, not really. There’s still blocking and tackling and strength involved. A bigger part of 8-player is definitely speed, and we had a really explosive team.

“But we more than doubled our numbers. We got our band back for halftime. We had our cheerleaders back. The kids could finish practice at home, then go and support the volleyball team. It brought a lot of energy back to the district and was a real positive for us.”

By 2000, 26 teams opted for 8-player, enough for the association to establish a 4-team postseason. That November, Adair-Casey beat Elk Horn-Kimballton 25-24 to win the first 8-player state title in Iowa history. Around 2,000 fans came to Adair to watch the game, including Bernie Saggau, then the association’s executive director, and Rick Wulkow, the assistant executive director.

Up to that point, Elk Horn-Kimballton had won its first 27 8-player games. But Brian Reha recorded 31 carries for 129 yards and scored on a 1-yard run in the third quarter to put Adair-Casey up 25-12. The Danes rallied with two touchdowns in the final three-and-a-half minutes, but Heath Paulsen's potential game-tying extra-point attempt after the second score went wide.

“It feels good to win the first one,” Reha told the Des Moines Register afterward. “We made history.”

‘This is nowhere near its peak yet’

Two years after that inaugural title game, the association’s Board of Control voted to include the 8-player title game at the UNI-Dome, which has housed all the state championship games since 1976. Sentral (Fenton) beat Farragut 44-34 that year for the first of back-to-back crowns.

By 2006, 47 teams played 8-player. It had grown so much that the association expanded the postseason to 16 teams and included the 8-player semifinal games in the UNI-Dome. Northeast Hamilton beat Essex, 24-6, in the lowest-scoring 8-player final in state history.

Participation numbers had stabilized by then. The 11-player game actually grew from 1996-97 to 2006-07, up to 20,833 players despite dropping to 317 schools, according to the NFHS. The 8-player game added another 1,296 participants — about 28 per school.

“Most conversations we had were positive,” says Wulkow, who later served as the association’s executive director from 2005-15. “I can’t think of many negatives. Schools had to change their football fields and move their goal posts, but that was it.

“It was so good for the communities to have Friday night football. The lights came on, and the community came out to support. It served a lot of purposes, and it’s still doing that today.”

Today, Iowa’s 66 8-player teams is the sixth-highest total in the country, trailing only Nebraska (121), Kansas (108), California (105), Oklahoma and Michigan (both at 79). That’s out of 22 states that offer 8-player as a sanctioned sport, per the NFHS.

Some coaches believe more are on the way.

“I would bet this is nowhere near its peak yet,” says Rob Luther, the head coach at Baxter, which dropped to 8-player in 2017 after breaking off from Collins-Maxwell. “With enrollment issues and towns wanting to continue all their other sports, 8-player is such a great, viable option.

“We’re fighting for the game right now all across the state, and this gives those small communities a chance to still have football. A lot of schools will still come together to play, but for those that don’t, this is an option.”

Switching to 8-player hasn’t limited opportunity for the athletes, either. In 2015, the Iowa Hawkeyes played three defensive lineman from 8-player programs: Drew Ott (Turnbull, Nebraska), Nathan Bazata (Howells, Nebraska), and Nate Meier (Fremont-Mills, Iowa). Even more, Chad Greenway, a former Iowa linebacker who played 11 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, actually played 9-player football as a high-schooler in South Dakota.

Many schools that were successful 11-player teams have transitioned to 8-player. Sentral (Fenton) finished as the Class A state runner-up in both 1981-82, then won 8-player titles in 2002-03. Gladbrook-Reinbeck capped its 11-player run with two straight crowns in 2015-16 before dropping. West Bend-Mallard won four Class A titles (1994, 1998-99, 2004) and is now an 8-player program. Riceville won Class A in 1993 and is also now an 8-player team.

Only one school has successfully won titles in both 11- and 8-player: Glidden-Ralston, which won the Class 1A title in 1975 under Barry Brandt, then won the 8-player championship in 2005 under Kreg Lensch.

Entering the 2019 season, 13 different schools have won 8-player state titles. Don Bosco, the Register’s preseason No. 1 team, leads the way with three (2013, 2016-17). Five other schools have two. One of them, Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn, has since moved back up to Class A after merging with Remsen-Union.

History will be made in one form or another when Iowa’s 20th 8-player state champion is crowned in November. Looking back, Wiebers, Hjelle, and Wulkow never would’ve imagined it would’ve grown so much over the past two decades.

“We made the right decisions for the right reasons,” Wulkow says, “and that’s been proven by the amount of participation we have today, all these years later.”

Cody Goodwin covers wrestling and high school sports for the Des Moines Register. Follow him on Twitter at @codygoodwin.

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Iowa's 8-player state champions

The 2019 high school football season will mark 20 years of 8-player postseason football. Here's a list of all the 8-player state champs in state history, with the year, team, record, and head coach included.