Shawn Morse was a sophomore lineman for the Winooski High football team when his coaches came to the team with news: the Vermont Principals Association had just sanctioned an 8-man football tournament for the 1992 season, allowing some of the state’s smallest programs to continue to compete with fewer players on the field.
Winooski fit the bill — a program that had, for years, struggled to find enough athletes to compete playing traditional 11-on-11.
Morse remembers the excitement. It was like the program had just been given another lease on life.
Twelve years later, Morse, a Colchester, Vt., resident and junior varsity football coach at Champlain Valley Union High this past fall, saw the warning signs of another crisis in Vermont football: smaller teams in Vermont’s Division III — the lowest tier of football in the state — forfeiting games and canceling seasons due to low numbers; lopsided scores between schools with similar enrollment numbers; a shrinking amount of junior varsity squads; and the virtual extinction of freshman teams in the Green Mountain state.
So Morse, who has a background in website design administration and works remotely for Dealer.com, a car dealership website, took to social media to help spread the word. He launched a Facebook page, ‘8Man Football in Vermont’ in 2016, started @VT8ManFootball on Twitter in Oct. 2017 and began blogging on a Wordpress website, sharing information on the benefits of 8-man football and ways it could help keep Vermont’s programs afloat.
“I ended up feeling like football was starting to die,” Morse said in a phone interview earlier this week. “My alma mater lost its program, Montpelier, too, because of numbers. Low numbers at smaller schools. In a nutshell, I was kind of annoyed it happened. I started a Facebook account, started a blog, a Twitter account … I wanted to start creating some buzz about it.”
His advocacy has gotten the Vermont Interscholastic Football League’s attention. Morse made a presentation at a VIFL meeting last year, outlining the benefits of 8-man football and the different ways the state could implement it at different levels of the sport.
If anything, said Otter Valley assistant coach Chas Hall, Morse’s work is forcing those involved in Vermont football to reconsider things.
“(The VIFL) did his presentation last year, we had a lot of conversations about 8-man football,” Hall said earlier this week. “I think we’re talking about 8-man football in ways that we hadn’t previously. … Things are changing. There’s a lot to it.”
Vermont football has been under some scrutiny over the last several years, with co-operative programs popping up throughout the state to try to combat shrinking participation. This season, Oxbow, Missisquoi and Mount St. Joseph’s canceled part, if not all, of their regular season schedule due to lower-than-expected participation numbers.
Woodstock, which eventually went on to win a D-III title, was forced to take several bye weeks. Hartford head coach Matt Trombly said after his team’s postseason loss to St. Johnsbury last month that his biggest concern going forward was participation numbers, citing only 27 student-athletes on the roster by season’s end.
For Morse, 8-man football provides a viable alternative option. The game is faster and higher-scoring than its traditional 11-on-11 iteration, opening up the field with three fewer players on either side of the ball. It also gives schools with smaller enrollments a chance to compete.
“It was actually touted to us as a fast-moving, high-scoring game. I played it. It was,” Morse said. “We’d put up 30-plus points a game. The year before, we struggled with injuries and barely finished our season. … We embraced it. It was still football.”
The VPA sanctioned 8-man — aligned in D-IV — from 1992 to 2006, discontinuing it due to the small numbers of programs that were competing. It also served as a way for newer, smaller programs to build themselves up to full 11-man football; U-32, Milton, Mount Mansfield, Champlain Valley, Mill River, Mount Abraham, Colchester and Otter Valley all, at one time, competed in 8-man football. Winooski won back-to-back 8-man titles in 1992-93. Its football program folded in 2015.
The VIFL elected to put realignment on hold at its fall meeting last week, tabling discussions of 8-man football as well.
“I feel like I’m a one-man army, putting information out there,” Morse said. “There are a lot of people who definitely support it.”
Hall may be one of those people, even if he believes 8-man might be too little, too late.
“I’ve come to the sad conclusion that it might be too late for 8-man football,” Hall said. “We’ve already lost programs that fall within the enrollment range that fit well for it: Winooski, MSJ, Montpelier. … Choice could have thrived there. Unfortunately, we’ve weeded out those teams already, and embraced going toward sustaining 11-man football or not at all.
“(8-man) could be part of the solution,” he added. “It’s great that (Morse) is putting it out there, putting himself out there. … It’s good for us to get the conversation started.”
For now, Morse said he plans on continuing his push — attending VIFL meetings, making presentations to coaches and athletic directors. To him, the work has just begun.
“It’s good for us. It’s good for Vermont. It’s great for football in Vermont,” Morse said. “We need to adopt this. It’s something we should be doing. I can’t imagine anybody today saying we can only keep three divisions. We’re doing the kids a disservice.
“It’s a problem, and it’s not going away.”
Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.