NEW LONDON \u2014 Darin Loyd knew this day was possible at some point this season.<\/p>\n
He just hoped it wouldn\u2019t happen this soon.<\/p>\n
The New London School District on Wednesday opted to end the New London High School football season, just four weeks into the Tigers\u2019 return to the 11-player game.<\/p>\n
Loyd, the Tigers\u2019 head coach, said several key injuries prompted the district to take action to prevent further injuries to players on an already depleted roster.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t what Loyd or anyone else wanted, but it became a necessity this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur quarterback and our back-up quarterback both got injured last week,\u201d Loyd said. \u201cIt really came down to numbers. We only have 12 or 13 players available this week. We played our first two games with just 14 players and that was a real struggle. Now with just 12 or 13 players, it makes it almost impossible to play. We thought it was in the best interests of everybody to just shut it down and start trying to build it back up for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
New London ends the year with a 2-2 overall record, 1-2 in Class A District 5.<\/p>\n
With Highland having already shut down its season after Week 2, that leaves District 5 with just five teams \u2014 Pekin, Columbus, Danville, Wapello and Van Buren County.<\/p>\n
New London\u2019s remaining games against Columbus, Danville, BGM and Van Buren County will go down as 17-0 forfeit wins for those teams for playoff tiebreaker purposes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were hoping we could pick it back up and finish out the season, but it just won\u2019t work,\u201d Loyd said. \u201cBy the time we get those guys back at the earliest it would be two weeks. By then we would have to forfeit two games and the state would probably shut us down anyway. Even if we did continue, we would still be ineligible for the playoffs anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
New London is the third southeast Iowa high school football team to shut down its season due to low numbers and the eighth statewide.<\/p>\n
Lone Tree previously canceled its season due to low numbers before the season got under way.<\/p>\n
Last year\u2019s 8-Player state champion Remsen St. Marys also has canceled its season.<\/p>\n
For Loyd and the Tigers, its back to the drawing board to plan for the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to figure things out,\u201d Loyd said. \u201cOur junior high kids are having a really good season. They are having a lot of fun playing on the big field and scoring a lot of points.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s small-school sports. You are going to have your ups and downs. We had a lot of good kids for a really long time. Now we are experiencing the opposite end of the spectrum. We just need to get things figured out on how to move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW LONDON \u2014 Darin Loyd knew this day was possible at some point this season. He just hoped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[24398,748,393,4884,257,151757,151756,79,151758,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-451041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-american-football","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-national-football-league","14":"tag-nfl-teams","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-team-sports","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115266497281049579","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}