The Eureka football team wraps up its 2018 regular season a day earlier than is typical for a high school season.
The Wildcats (7-1) host Seckman tonight (Thursday), giving them an extra day to start preparing for the postseason. The district playoffs are slated to start Oct. 26.
“When it comes to when I would like to play, high school football is meant to be played on Friday nights,” said Eureka head coach Jake Sumner, whose team is coming off a 13-12 road loss to Marquette on Oct. 12. “Ideally, that’s when we love to see it. The environment that comes along with a Friday experience is awesome, but at the end of the day, we want to play games. It doesn’t matter if we are playing them on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday.”
Eureka had to move its game to Thursday because of the shortage of officials for high school sports.
Not enough new recruits are entering the officiating ranks, and of those that do, only about 20 percent stay in it after their second year, according to surveys by the National Federation of State High School Associations, the national governing body of prep athletics.
As a result, games are being postponed, moved, rescheduled, or not played at all.
Schools throughout the St. Louis area have shifted football games from Friday night, making some officiating crews do double-duty every week.
“What we were told was with the shortage of officials, this will be on a rotating basis,” Eureka activities director Gregg Cleveland said. “They didn’t give us an exact number, but they said if you get it this year (moving a game to Thursday), it will be a couple of years before you have to do it again – unless more officials become available.”
Tonight’s game will be the second time this season Seckman (6-2), which is coming off a 49-0 loss at Fox on Oct. 12, has played a Thursday night game. The Jaguars beat University City 50-16 on Sept. 6.
Seckman head coach Doug Baker said playing on Thursday made it a little harder to prepare, especially with the U-City contest coming the week of Memorial Day, but the team adjusted.
“The schedule did not set up well for us, but the kids handled it pretty well,” Baker said.
He also said the atmosphere for the game wasn’t very different from a traditional Friday night game.
“(The crowd) was a little down,” Baker said. “When you have school the following day, it will be down. (But) we had a pretty good atmosphere.”
Having school the next day is a concern about Thursday games. But coaches and athletic directors whose teams have played on a Thursday said they haven’t received reports that students struggled in classes the next day.
“It was weird to come back on Friday and not have a game,” said Northwest AD Jeff Taggart, whose son, Avery, plays for Eureka and whose school played its Week 2 game (a 7-3 win over Parkway South) on a Thursday (Aug. 30). “But (there was) nothing about people not performing in the classroom.”
Baker said he didn’t hear about any issues in the classroom either.
“We told our kids they needed to be at school on time,” Baker said. “They were dragging a little bit, but it is a little easier to get up to go to school on Friday when you win Thursday night.”
Sumner said his schedule of taking master’s degree courses at the start of the football season allowed him to watch a couple of Thursday games: Kirkwood hosting Francis Howell in Week 2 on Aug. 30 and Marquette hosting Kirkwood in Week 3 on Sept. 6.
Sumner said from what he could tell, the atmosphere for those games was typical of a Friday night game.
“Overall, the games I attended looked to be normal,” Sumner said.
The Eureka coach said he expects tonight’s game to have the typical feel of a Friday night for the Wildcats.
“I would hope it will be a good turnout,” Sumner said. “We are doing our first-responders night. There will be a 50/50 raffle and all first-responders will get in for free and be recognized during the game.”
The officials shortage in Missouri spans all sports. The Missouri State High School Activities Association has launched three programs to address it: the High School Graduate initiative, the “4 for 1” program and the “Trade Your Stripes” effort.
The High School Graduate pilot program started this summer. Athletic directors across the state were asked to find male and female 2018 graduates who might consider officiating. MSHSAA is offering to pay the registration fee of $65 for the first year. The state group also will cover the fees for a second sport ($30) and every additional sport ($25). So far, 36 recent grads have entered the program and 22 have registered.
The 4 for 1 plan challenges current officials and head coaches to recruit and retain at least one new official every four years.
Trade Your Stripes seeks out active-duty or retired members of the military to take the skills they’ve learned to the fields, courts and diamonds, with MSHSAA covering the registration costs as in the High School Graduate program.
Schools are doing their part by promoting these programs and making announcements at games to encourage fans to get involved.
“We’ve had two or three people call about becoming an official,” Cleveland said. “I (think) they were in soccer. But any official we can get is big. It’s not like football is the only sport we are struggling in; it’s across the board.
“The official issue is something we are talking about. All the (athletic/activities directors) are trying to come up with ideas and educate people about how important it is. If (officials) keep quitting and you don’t get new ones, I don’t know what it will look like in the future. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But somewhere there is going to have to be a change.”