THE VANISHING MARGIN | PART 1 OF 3
For this series, Lee Patterson sent questions to the head coach and athletic director at every current Arizona 1A football program. He also sought perspective from schools that no longer field varsity teams. Coaches and administrators from across the state responded, providing a firsthand look at the distances, shrinking rosters and difficult decisions shaping the future of eight-man football in Arizona.
By Lee Patterson
The map is the first opponent.
El Capitan High School sits in Colorado City, tucked against Arizona’s northern border. Valley Union is in Elfrida, deep in the southeastern corner of the state. Mohave Accelerated plays in Bullhead City along the Colorado River. Desert Heights Prep is in Glendale, surrounded by the freeways, subdivisions and larger schools of metropolitan Phoenix.
Joseph City, Bagdad and St. David play in the communities whose names they carry. One is in northeastern Arizona. Another is tucked into the state’s western interior. The third sits in the southeastern desert.
Together, they belong to Arizona’s smallest football classification.
Arizona’s eight-man football programs are islands, scattered across deserts, mountains and hundreds of miles of highway. They are connected less by proximity than by necessity. When one program disappears, the others feel it.
A canceled season in Colorado City can create a scheduling problem in St. David. A varsity team stepping away in Elfrida can send another school searching for an opponent in New Mexico, Nevada or Colorado.
There are two shortages pressing against eight-man football in Arizona.
Some schools do not have enough players.
The schools that remain do not have enough nearby opponents.
During one game last fall, El Capitan reached the point where positions no longer mattered as much as finding someone, anyone, who could step onto the field and give an exhausted teammate a chance to take a breather.
El Capitan coach Stephen Campbell sent a 320-pound offensive lineman to wide receiver.
It was not a trick formation. Nobody expected him to sprint past the secondary. El Capitan simply needed another body on the field.
“We didn’t have enough depth to rotate athletes, so everyone was playing nearly every snap,” Campbell said. “That’s not fair to the athletes, it’s not ideal football, and it raises legitimate concerns about player safety.”
El Capitan began the season with 16 players. Then a measles outbreak affected families in the community. Games were canceled. The season lost momentum. The roster eventually fell to 10.
Campbell and the school’s administration faced a question that has become familiar across Arizona’s smallest programs.
How few players are too few?
Eight players are required to put a team on the field. That does not mean eight players can safely carry one through an entire season.
El Capitan decided it could not.
The Eagles will not field a football team this year.
Nearly the length of the state away, Valley Union reached a different version of the same decision. The Blue Devils graduated nine seniors from a school with fewer than 100 students. Rather than place a young and physically inexperienced group into varsity competition, Valley Union moved to a junior varsity schedule this year.
The football program remains. The varsity team does not.
On an alignment sheet, those decisions represent two changes.
On the map, they create two holes hundreds of miles apart.
The Arizona Interscholastic Association sees a classification whose overall size has remained relatively steady.
“There are 22 schools playing football in the 1A Conference,” AIA executive director Jim Dean said. “This number has stayed pretty consistent for decades, even back to my freshman and sophomore years in high school.”
The number 22 sounds stable.
It also sounds larger than it feels.
St. David coach Braden Davis believes the practical count of teams completing full varsity schedules is closer to 20 after the changes involving El Capitan and Valley Union.
The AIA’s number describes the classification.
Davis is worried about the teams available to play one another.
“I fear we’re seeing the beginning of the end of 1A or eight-man football in Arizona,” Davis said. “Maybe the beginning of the end was a few years ago. I’m not sure what the answer is.”
St. David is not preparing to cancel. The Tigers had 18 players at summer camp and expect approximately 23 when the season begins. That is fewer than the program typically carries, and a large portion of the roster consists of freshmen, but St. David expects to play.
Finding opponents is another matter.
St. David has scheduled a game on the road in Colorado. Williams will play an opponent from Nevada. Duncan will again face Lordsburg, New Mexico.
Those games provide competition and help complete schedules. They also reveal how far some Arizona schools must search to find enough eight-man football.
The trips are not novelties. They are evidence.
If St. David had another dependable eight-man opponent nearby, it would not need to search several hundred miles away. If southeastern Arizona had a dense cluster of programs, the loss of Valley Union’s varsity team would not carry as much weight.
But Arizona eight-man football has few dense clusters.
It has outposts.
The disappearance of one team produces consequences far beyond that school. Opponents lose games from their schedules. Athletic directors must search for replacements after many programs have already finalized their seasons. Transportation costs rise. Bus rides lengthen. Students miss more class time. Coaches prepare for unfamiliar opponents from outside their region or state.
The damage can compound.
A team begins the season with nine scheduled games. One opponent cancels because its roster falls apart. Another game disappears because of injuries or eligibility problems. Suddenly, a program is not only losing Friday nights. It may also be struggling to complete enough games to reach the postseason.
San Simon athletic director Chris Lentz said 1A teams need six games to qualify for the state playoffs this season. He also said the AIA’s power-point system does not provide a way for games against 2A or larger opponents to produce a calculated result.
That leaves schools searching for other 1A opponents, no matter how far away they may be.
The smaller the classification becomes, the less protection it has against another loss.
San Simon offers a view of what can happen after a football program disappears.
The school has not fielded a tackle football team in at least seven years. Its high school enrollment has remained in the low-to-mid 30s, leaving the district without enough students to build what it considers a safe roster.
“We just do not have enough kids to safely put a team together,” Lentz said.
The absence is personal for Lentz. He played eight-man football for a combined Bowie-San Simon team during the 1990s. He knows what Friday nights once looked like in the community.
He also knows that football does not automatically return after one canceled season.
A temporary pause can become permanent. A group of freshmen moves through high school without a program. Younger students grow up without watching varsity football at their school. Families stop expecting it to return. Coaches find other jobs. Equipment ages. Friday night becomes a story told by former players.
San Simon has gone at least seven years without a team.
That is the warning facing El Capitan.
It is also the uncertainty surrounding Valley Union. The Blue Devils hope a junior varsity season develops players and creates a path back to varsity football.
Maryvale Prep provides evidence that the bridge can work.
After collapsing to 12 players in 2024, the Phoenix school moved to a junior varsity schedule, rebuilt its roster and is returning with both varsity and junior varsity teams this year.
Maryvale Prep’s full comeback is a story of its own, but its example matters here.
Valley Union’s move to junior varsity is not necessarily the beginning of an ending.
It could be the beginning of a rebuild.
The problem is that eight-man football cannot afford for too many struggling teams to take that step at the same time.
Every varsity program matters because every varsity program fills someone else’s schedule.
Combining schools is often presented as an obvious answer. If two programs cannot find enough players separately, perhaps they can create one healthy roster together.
The Arizona map complicates that solution.
Cicero Prep and North Phoenix Prep can operate a cooperative team in the Phoenix area. Bowie and San Simon once combined in southeastern Arizona.
For many schools, the distances are too great. Students cannot reasonably travel an hour or more after school each day to practice with another program, then return home late enough to begin homework. Coaches, buses and facilities would have to be coordinated across districts.
Two schools can each need football players and still be too far apart to help one another.
Lentz (San Simon) also sees a competitive problem.
Imagine a school with approximately 70 students that is barely finding enough players to survive on its own. Then imagine two larger schools asking permission to combine their enrollments and rosters.
Voting against the cooperative program may protect the smallest school from facing a newly created powerhouse.
It also removes another potential opponent from everyone’s schedule.
“If your school had 70 kids and was scraping by with just enough kids to field a team, would you vote for two schools who are both larger than yours to combine so they can play?” Lentz said. “It is completely understandable for that school to vote against it, but at the same time, they are eliminating a potential opponent for everyone.”
There is no painless solution.
Sedona Red Rock and Valley Lutheran recently moved from 2A into eight-man football. Their arrivals appeared to give the classification two replacements.
Then El Capitan canceled and Valley Union moved to junior varsity.
The classification gained two programs and effectively lost two varsity teams.
San Carlos was initially listed in 1A before returning to 2A as an independent prior to last season. Davis (St. David) said other smaller or struggling 2A programs have been encouraged to consider moving down but declined.
The pathway exists.
“In the current system, schools have the opportunity to appeal up or down for football placement,” Dean (AIA) said. “There are currently teams from the 2A Conference that have appealed and are playing eight-man football in the 1A Conference.”
The harder question is why more schools do not want to follow.
Part of the answer may be perception. Some schools still view eight-man football as a demotion, even when their 11-man rosters are thin, and their teams are struggling competitively.
Part of it may be structural. Moving to eight-man requires coaches to redesign offenses and defenses. It can require changes to fields and facilities.
And part of it is the map.
A 2A school considering eight-man football is not only choosing a different version of the sport. It may be choosing road trips to Bullhead City, Colorado City, Joseph City, Bagdad or St. David.
The classification needs more teams to reduce travel.
Travel makes the classification less attractive to potential teams.
That is the cycle.
Thin rosters cause cancellations. Cancellations remove opponents. Fewer opponents create longer trips and more difficult schedules. Those demands make eight-man football less appealing to schools that might otherwise join.
Then another roster loses two players.
Another Friday disappears.
Another bus must travel farther.
Arizona eight-man football is still here. Helmets have come out in Bagdad, Joseph City, St. David, Bullhead City, Glendale and communities scattered across the state. The lights will turn on, and players will take the field.
But every team is connected by the highway between them.
A program disappears in Colorado City, and a schedule becomes harder to fill in southeastern Arizona.
A varsity team steps away in Elfrida, and an opponent begins looking toward New Mexico.
San Simon has gone seven years without football, and the empty place it left on the map remains empty.
The official number may still look steady.
The distance between the teams tells another story.
Coming Friday, July 31: Part 2 of The Vanishing Margin examines the safety and development challenges inside Arizona’s smallest football rosters, where athletes may play offense, defense and special teams, and one injury can threaten an entire season.
Editor’s note: Quotes provided in written responses have been lightly edited for grammar, punctuation and clarity without changing their meaning.
