By Chris Babb | The Arkadelphian
The 2022 Arkadelphia Badger football season is right around the corner as the Badgers kickoff this Friday at Camden-Fairview, but for fans who have watched the Badgers over the last few seasons, what lies around the corner looks a little different than it has in the past.
Arkadelphia enters 2022 coming off of a 4A state semifinal appearance and is preparing for its third season under head coach Trey Schucker.
The Badgers are still in the 4A-7 conference, but the opponents will look a little different after the classifications and conferences for the 2022-24 cycle were announced earlier in the spring – and the amount of conference opponents has changed in the last two months after conferences were released.
Where high schools are allowed to play 10 regular season games over an 11-week period, only two of the 4A-7 schools have 10 games this season. Some have nine games and as of publication of this story, Arkadelphia only has eight games on the 2022 schedule and we’ll explain why after we lay a little background.
The Arkansas Activities Association (AAA) reclassifies classifications (7A, 6A, 5A, 4A, etc.) and conferences every two years based on each school’s average daily enrollment of students in grades 9-11 over a three-year period. Traditionally, all public and private schools were put on a list and broken up into the classifications fans were familiar with over the last few cycles.
The 2022-24 cycle introduced the Competitive Equity Factor (CEF) into play that was adopted during the August 2021 AAA Governing body meeting. Administrators from school districts across the state send voting members to the Governing Body meeting to vote in new rules and policies for the AAA Handbook.
The CEF involves the classification of private schools and uses a formula to classify private schools based on recent success or struggles in competition in addition to the existing multiplier that was already in place. To simplify the explanation, a private school that has had a lot of success in a particular sport can go up a class and a private school that has struggled can move down a class.
To learn more about the CEF, click here to read a story from AAA partner Scorebook Live after the policy was adopted last summer.
How that affects the Badgers in 2022 and 2023 in football is indirect, but still changes the schedule that Badger fans have been accustomed to seeing based on the fact that private schools are added into classifications after the public schools are classified.
Whereas in the past there was a hard cut-off for the number of schools in a classification, the adoption of the CEF allows for there to be different numbers than traditionally allowed in classifications and the AAA also voted to not mandate that conferences had eight members.
For the last two or three cycles, the 4A-7 consisted of Arkadelphia, Ashdown, Bauxite, Fountain Lake, Haskell Harmony Grove, Malvern, Nashville and Joe T. Robinson.
Still in the conference for the next two seasons are Arkadelphia, Ashdown, Malvern and Nashville. After that, the conference opponents are different.
Joe T. Robinson moved up to class 5A for the next two years, so the Senators wouldn’t have been on the Badgers’ conference schedule anyway.
Due to the different way the conferences within 4A had to be drawn up geographically, Bauxite and Haskell Harmony Grove were moved to the 4A-4. The 4A-4 had traditionally centered around schools in the River Valley, but has more of a Central Arkansas flair now.
Because of that geographical shift, two schools previously in that 4A-4 league return to the 4A-7 for the next two seasons. Mena and Waldron have gone back and forth between the 4A-7 and 4A-4 over the last few cycles, but both schools will be in the 4A-7 and on Arkadelphia’s schedule for at least the next two seasons.
The remaining two schools that were initially on Arkadelphia’s schedule are what has thrown a kink into the normally smooth scheduling of conference game weeks after the three non-conference games are played in the beginning of the year.
Genoa Central High School from extreme southwest Arkansas was moved up into class 4A from class 3A and into the 4A-7 with the most recent reclassification process. After initially having a schedule, Genoa Central announced early in the spring semester that it would drop to 8-man football and would not play the 4A-7 schedule it was slotted to play, even though 8-man football isn’t sanctioned by the AAA for Class 3A schools and above.
That created one open date in the schedules of the remaining seven schools. For Arkadelphia, that date was week nine which is October 28th this fall and would have been Senior Night.
Fountain Lake was initially in the 4A-7 conference as it had been in the past, but announced late in the spring semester that the Cobra football team would also be playing 8-man football for the next two seasons instead of 11-man in the 4A-7.
That created the second open date for the remaining seven schools. For Arkadelphia, that is week six and falls on October 7th this fall.
In 2022 and 2023, the 4A-7 will have six schools and five of them will advance to the 4A State Playoffs.
Most schools have been able to fill at least one date, but finding teams with open dates in the middle of the conference season isn’t easy anyway, but especially tough when looking in the spring and summer after schedules have been set.
Arkadelphia Badger head football coach Trey Schucker has a list of more than 10 schools who have open dates that correspond with Arkadelphia’s open dates, but have said that they would not be able to play the Badgers for various reasons. The list of schools that have said no to Schucker’s inquiries about playing is longer than the list of eight schools the Badgers will be playing.
The loss of the games also means the loss of the last home game of the season which alternates between week nine and 10. As of publication of this story, the last home game will be on October 14 against Waldron which will be Senior Night. That week has traditionally been the Homecoming week every other year, but Homecoming has had to be moved up to September 30. Instead of the normal five home games in a season, Arkadelphia’s schedule features only four home games.
As different as it may be for Arkadelphia, one silver lining is that one of the games lost was a home game and one was a road game. Malvern’s games against Fountain Lake and Genoa Central were both supposed to be home games, so the Leopards will only have three regular season home games this fall. The Leopards did pick up a game to fill one of the spots, but are having to travel to Hernando, Mississippi, just outside of Memphis to fill that open date.
The regular season schedule as of publication is as follows. For those who can’t attend, the games can be viewed online at www.arkadelphiabadgertv.com/broadcasts .
