The landscape of the Northern Michigan Football League is set to change over the next year.
Last year the league added Sault Ste. Marie and Ogemaw Heights to its Legends Division lineup for the 2020 season while Inland Lakes is set to leave the conference as it drops down to 8-player this fall.
With numbers dwindling in the North Star League as more members drop to 8-player, Rogers City, Lincoln Alcona and Tawas will depart the conference following the 2020 season and join the NMFL in 2021, bringing the conference membership to 21 schools. Rogers City and Lincoln Alcona had been North Star members since 2013 while Tawas is a recent addition to the conference.
“It was a little bit of a struggle for us to find out exactly, you know, is that what’s best for the league and if it is have they fit,” league commissioner and Frankfort athletic director Dave Jackson said. “So we took a look at it and we had our AD’s meeting back in November after the season was over and tried to determine what those four schools plus Tawas, the fifth school, how they would fit, and we were actually looking at just try and figure out a way to kind of balance things out a little bit and keep the divisions even just for kind of simplicity and schedule, knowing that this was going to really enlarge our footprint even bigger.”
The league has proposed the following alignment for 2021, with enrollment included:
Legends Division
Sault Ste. Marie (700)
Ogemaw Heights (624)
Cheboygan (527)
Benzie Central (505)
Grayling (473)
Kingsley (443)
Tawas (421)
Traverse City St. Francis (355)
Leaders Division
Kalkaska (468)
Boyne City (418)
Glen Lake (395)
Elk Rapids (366)
Charlevoix (335)
Mancelona (297)
Legacy Division
Harbor Springs (280)
East Jordan (250)
Johannesburg-Lewiston (226)
Lincoln Alcona (225)
Rogers City (214)
St. Ignace (209)
Frankfort (174)
© 2023 - 910 Media Group
