Royals football moving districts for 2017 season

Last fall, the Royals football team combined with Shakopee, Prior Lake, Maple Grove and the other Lake conference teams to make the 6A West Metro district.

For the fall of 2017, the decision has been made by the Minnesota High School Association to make some adjustments to the districts. The West Metro district will still play 6A teams in the section playoffs, but will play some 5A teams during their regular season. This new district is not yet named.

According to John DenHartog, the Royals head football coach, the change is not due to wins and losses, but the amount of students enrolled at the school. When a school has more students, it has more athletes and teams. The problem is, there’s an imbalance in the number of teams per school within the district.

Recently, HHS enrollment has been decreasing, while schools like Eden Prairie and Wayzata have almost doubled the amount of students of HHS. This disrupts all sports, but specifically football.

“When you have schools with around 4,000 students, they’ll have more teams,” DenHartog said. “We have smaller numbers, so we only have a 9th grade team, JV and varsity.”

This is an issue because the number of teams doesn’t match up between schools, which leaves some teams without an opponent or game when they’re scheduled to play HHS.

Besides uneven matches, enrollment numbers have also created problems in safety.

“At HHS we have lots of sophomores on JV, where other schools with larger numbers have seniors on their JV team. That creates a level of danger in games,” DenHartog said.

The change in the regular season games could affect the section playoffs, even though the Royals will still only play 6A teams. The coaches determine rankings for the 6A teams at the end of the regular season, based on their wins and loses.

“It’s too early to tell if the change will affect the playoffs for sure,” DenHartog said. “But we’ll play some new schools and it’ll be fun to get a look at different teams.”

With 2006 being the last HHS appearance at State, hopes are high that this change will be more helpful than harmful to the football State team, especially with twenty seniors graduating this spring.

“It’ll be nice to play some new teams,” said Evan Tikal, junior. “Our team always struggles because we play some of the best teams in the state.”

In the new district, some of the teams the Royals will play are St. Louis Park, Chanhassen, Benilde-St. Margaret’s, Robbinsdale Armstrong, and Bloomington Jefferson.

Without competitors like Minnetonka, Eden Prairie and Maple Grove in the new district, additional rivalries will be formed.

For the most part, players are optimistic about the new change, especially the underclassmen.

“We’ll have a pretty young team next year, and it’ll be nice to have the new competition with widespread levels of skill,” Kulkarni said.