While there are 27 players out over four grades for football, just two are seniors and six are juniors, according to GHS AD Luke Ghiardi.

“We had an athletic committee meeting on Monday evening to discuss and announce our plans,” he said by phone on Wednesday.

“We’re forgoing the varsity team and will field a junior varsity team instead. We knew we had enough players for just one team.

“It’s partially a competition thing, but also a safety issue in trying to go up against other varsity squads.

Gwinn quarterback Carter Stansky rolls out looking downfield for a receiver in the second quarter of a high school game played against Manistique at McCormick Field in Gwinn on Oct. 12, 2024. (Journal file photo)

“We also wanted to make sure we fielded a team this fall for continuity in the program. We have good numbers of younger players ranging all the way down to the fifth and sixth grades.”

He added that the Michigan High School Athletic Association says that seniors can’t play on JV teams, so the two seniors probably won’t see any playing time.

On Monday afternoon, the MHSAA on its website, www.mhsaa.com, listed a nine-game varsity schedule for the Modeltowners, though its opener next Thursday against Gladstone had a line drawn through it with “Canceled” under the “Status” column.

On Wednesday, an updated varsity schedule showed seven games starting on Sept. 5 at home against Manistique. It was still a varsity schedule, with a separate section of the website showing its JV schedule.

Ghiardi said Gwinn’s JV schedule will be almost the same as the varsity, just with the dates moved up a day, and likely because of alternating home-away sites between varsity and JV — i.e., when the varsity team is at home, the JV game that same week is on the road — the host team will be switched.

“Yes, the games will be Thursdays, except the first week (next week), which was supposed to be the varsity on Thursday, so the JV game will be on Wednesday.

“And because Iron Mountain doesn’t have a JV team, we picked up Kingsford and that will be played at our field.”

That’s on Oct. 2. Right now, the Modeltowners’ JV schedule shows six games, and an impressive five of them will be at home.

Those dates are all at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays, except for next week. The games to be played at Gwinn are against Gladstone, 6 p.m. Wednesday; then vs. L’Anse on Sept. 11, Bark River-Harris on Sept. 18, Kingsford on Oct. 2 and Manistique on Oct. 9. The single away game is against Manistique on Sept. 4.

The JV schedule is available at the MHSAA website, with a direct link at https://www.mhsaa.com/schools/gwinn/boys/junior-varsity/football/2025-26.

Folding the varsity program for this season at Gwinn forces its nine opponents — actually seven as both L’Anse and Manistique were scheduled to play the Modeltowners twice — to look for a new varsity game, or just leave their original date (or dates) vs. Gwinn as an open week in the schedule.

While L’Anse and Manistique will be the most heavily affected, Westwood also had a date vs. the Modeltowners — and in the final week of the regular season on Oct. 24.

Several people outside the Gwinn schools asked about the possibility of the Modeltowners playing eight-player football instead.

There would be several logistical nightmares involved in that, however.

The biggest and most immediate would have to be scheduling, as 11-player teams never shift to playing the eight-player game within a season, or vice versa.

So the Modeltowners would have had to create a schedule with an entirely new set of teams in just a few weeks, a seemingly impossible task even if they could find opponents with open dates at the right times in their schedules.

The strategies of the eight-player game with three fewer players and usually a narrower field take time to implement, as attested to by Ishpeming varsity coach Mike Lyman, in his second year with an eight-player team this fall.

“It was definitely a learning experience,” he said about his first season in 2024 for a team preview to be published in The Mining Journal next week. “It’s definitely a different game, but it’s also definitely football and definitely a tough game.”

The third major factor is that in all likelihood, Gwinn wouldn’t be eligible for the eight-player playoffs in late October and into November.

That’s because the MHSAA puts an enrollment limit of 215 students in a school — or schools in the case of a cooperative program — eligible for those playoffs.

Right now, the MHSAA site lists 106 schools playing the eight-player game this fall, but only 94 of them eligible for the postseason due to the enrollment limit being exceeded.

And Gwinn exceeds that limit by 21 with 236 students listed on the MHSAA website under information for the Modeltowners in all their sports.

The MHSAA has stated in the past that the enrollment number it uses usually vary slightly form the number used for per-student aid allocated by the state of Michigan as it tries to stay closer to the number of students actually eligible to play in MHSAA-sponsored sports.

There’s also a fourth factor that’s apparent when looking at the playoff-eligible list from the MHSAA — the sanctioning group sets the list of schools playing any particular sport well before those sports start their seasons.

In eight-player football, the MHSAA published the teams that would be in Divisions 1 and 2 on March 19, with 146 students the highest number in the smaller-schools division, Division 2.

Journal Sports Editor Steve Brownlee’s email address is sbrownlee@miningjournal.net