Newton moving to Class 3A in 2010

IHSAA approves Newton's drop to Class 3A
9/23/2009 By Troy Hyde NDN Sports Writer

It had always been a possibility, and Tuesday, the Iowa High School Athletic Association made it reality. The Newton football program is dropping to Class 3A. In a private meeting held Tuesday night, officials made some changes to high school football in the state of Iowa. And the Cardinals' dropping to Class 3A was a big one. "It would be nice to be a growing Class 4A school like Southeast Polk, Johnston, Waukee and other schools around Des Moines," Newton football coach Ed Ergenbright said. "But there are very few schools gaining enrollment. And we have steadily lost enrollment over the last decade. And we are who we are now."

The Cardinals went 3-7 last year and have begun the 2009 season 0-4. So being placed on an even playing field is something that Ergenbright and Newton Athletic Director Dave Kalkhoff had been seeking. Starting next year, the playing field should be more level, allowing the shrinking community of Newton to put out a good product on the gridiron. "It's a positive step," Ergenbright said. "It will help our gate, allow us to develop rivalries with some of these schools we'll be playing and we'll play similar teams that our other athletic teams are already playing."

While playing Class 3A teams should help the Cardinals become more competitive, Kalkhoff warns the community and athletes that it is not the end all to becoming successful. "The bottom line is we wanted to be able to compete," Kalkhoff said. "And when you take on teams twice your size with twice as many kids, the guys get worn down and even injured. However, if we don't do the things that we used to do, we still won't be successful."

Kalkhoff said hard work in and out of the season needs to pick. The athletes at Newton need to be more dedicated to the weight room and need to be more prepared for the sports they want to play. "We still have to work hard," Kalkhoff said. "We need to get kids in the weight room. It has to be emphasized. Going to 3A is not the end all. We just have to commit to hard work. And prepare in season and out of season."

It had become apparent this year that Newton needed to drop to simply save the program. Too many kids were getting hurt, the players were nearly overmatched athletically every week and not many other Class 4A programs are forced to have two-way players. "It's obvious that there's a difference in numbers and in the size of the athletes," Ergenbright said. "It's unfair to ask the kids to play that way. So I am excited for the switch. It is tough to see kids you care about after games come into the locker room all beat up. It will be much fairer to our kids this way."

High school football: Newton's likely class move will lead to changes
9/23/2009 By John Naughton - Des Moines Register

Boone, Ia. — Newton High School’s football team is expected to drop from Class 4-A to 3-A next fall, a move that will trigger major changes. The 24 football teams in central and western Iowa — the 18-team CIML, Newton and five schools in the Missouri River Activities Conference — will be thrown off by the switch. The Iowa High School Athletic Association’s Board of Control on Tuesday approved the resulting changes:

• Newton will be placed in a Class 3-A district.

• CIML schools, including Des Moines-area, Ames, Marshalltown, Mason City, Ottumwa and Fort Dodge, will move to a 10-week, nine game schedule. Each team will have one bye week.

• The five Council Bluffs and Sioux City schools in the Missouri River Activities Conference will be permitted to schedule schools such as Harlan, Sioux City Heelan, Council Bluffs Lewis Central and South Sioux City, Neb., to fill their schedules.

Those schools express reservations concerning travel costs. For several years, CIML teams have provided games to those schools to fill the MRAC schedules. Newton’s enrollment is estimated to fall below 700 students in three grades used for classifying schools. That’s the cutoff between 4-A and 3-A. “It’s pretty evident that Newton is going to drop,” said Rick Wulkow, executive director of the Association. Newton has been an independent team since 2006. The Cardinals left the CIML for the Little Hawkeye Conference in other sports in 2006.

Ed Ergenbright, Newton’s football coach, said the school has steadily declined in enrollment for 10 to 12 years. The Cardinals are 0-4 this season and went 3-6 last season. “It’s going to be a change, but we’re looking at it as a positive change,” he said. There also been speculation on what district Newton will play in when the 2010 season begins. Right now, Ergenbright and Kalkhoff say there are three or four possibilities with teams from District 5, District 6, District 7 and District 8 being the most likely destination. "We just wanted a level playing field," Kalkhoff said. "We'll play anybody. That's just the way it is."

For the past two seasons, District 5 has consisted of teams such as Oskaloosa, Williamsburg, Mount Pleasant, Washington, Fort Madison and Keokuk. District 6 includes Little Hawkeye Conference representatives Grinnell, Pella, Knoxville, Norwalk and South Tama as well as Chariton, Centerville and Carlisle. The option that makes sense would be District 7, which currently includes Ballard, Carroll, Boone, Jefferson-Scranton, Saydel, Perry, Nevada and Dallas Center-Grimes.

An outside possibility would be to play in the district with the state's No. 1 ranked team in Harlan. Other teams in that district this year include Winterset, A-D-M of Adel, Atlantic, Creston, Glenwood and Clarke of Osceola. "Whoever we end up playing we will play for the next two years," Ergenbright said.

The decision to move Newton down to Class 3A came sooner than it was originally supposed to. That was because of another decision made by the IHSAA on Tuesday. The state also approved Class 4A teams out west — such as schools from Council Bluffs and Sioux City — being able to schedule games against Class 3A teams closer to them in proximity. That meant the person in charge of scheduling needed to know where Newton stood so planning could be done accordingly. Other programs around the state will learn their fates on which class they will play in when the official numbers are calculated and released in mid-October.