Good morning football coaches and athletic directors.
Thank you for your patience during the scheduling process. Football schedules will be released on Monday, April 7 at Noon on the IHSAA website. You can go to the “Football” tab on our website and they will be organized by class with the 2025 schedule and the 2026 schedule. Just a few notes prior to the release.
When the schedules are released, they will show the week (Week 1, Week 2, etc.) in one column, the date of each Friday of each week and then your opponent in the next column with whether it is a home game or an away game. School districts with 3 or more high schools that share facilities will need to play some games on Thursday nights or Saturdays. Those school districts will determine which contest is moved to Thursday or Saturday to avoid a stadium conflict. After the release of the schedule, it will be a local school district decision regarding moving a game from Friday to Thursday or Saturday. Permission is not needed from our office to move a Friday night game to another night.
Second, I am not naïve to believe that all 329 schools will be excited for the opponent or placement of each of the 8 or 9 games on their schedule. Through this process our office assigned 1366 games. Due to a lack of non-priority list matches, stadium conflicts, balancing of home and away games or some of our Class 1A schools selecting a large proportion of Class A schools on their non-district priority list, there are a number of games in which neither team placed their opponent on their non-district priority list. While some schools matched all seven spots on their priority list, six schools did not have a match with others only having one or two matches. Those schools with few matches still needed to have opponents assigned to them for the two-year period. With that all being said, 71% of schools have their entire non-district schedule from the priority list with another 24% of schools having all but one non-district game from the priority list. If you are unhappy with your non-district schedule of opponents, feel free to work with other schools to make switches, however, all teams need to be guaranteed their respective 8 game or 9 game schedule along with the appropriate number of home/away games over the two-year period. Our office will not change opponents after the schedules are released.
Finally, shortly after the schedules are posted Monday, I will send a link to access the submitted priority lists.
Again, thank you for your patience during this process.