The Baxter Bolts football team will play three home games in 2017. Head coach Rob Luther and Collins-Maxwell/Baxter Athletic Director Lori Fricke finalized an eight-game schedule recently.
The Bolts will begin the season with a Week 0 scrimmage at Colo-NESCO.
They open the regular season with back-to-back road games against West Central and Remsen St. Marys on Aug. 25 and Sept. 1.
The brand-new eight-player program will play in front of their home fans on Sept. 8 against English Valleys.
That leads the Bolts into an open week on Sept. 15. They return to action at Lone Tree on Sept. 22 and at Midland on Sept. 29.
The final two home games of the season come in back-to-back weeks. Baxter hosts WACO for Homecoming on Oct. 6 and hosts Springville for Senior Night on Oct. 13.
The final game of the season is Oct. 20 at Easton Valley.
There was a change made to Baxter’s original plans for its first eight-player schedule.
The Bolts and Collins-Maxwell Spartans had agreed to play in Week 2, but the Collins-Maxwell Board of Education recently voted to not play that game in 2017.
“I’m disappointed from a couple of perspectives,” Luther said. “To know some of our players at C-M won’t have the chance to play another game and another home game is disappointing. It’s also disappointing that we now have to travel 206 miles to play a road game when we could have traveled 15 to Maxwell.”
Collins-Maxwell Board of Education President Marcus Fricke explained the reason for not wanting to play Baxter next season at the school’s most recent board meeting.
“I think both districts have dealt with a lot of negativity around the athletic break-up, and it continues to be somewhat of an emotionally charged issue,” Marcus Fricke said. “I think from our perspective, from my perspective, I wanted to be looking at a 2017 CMB Raiders football season ... and that didn’t happen ... but I don’t feel like playing Baxter next year is going to be a positive experience.”
Luther understands that playing Collins-Maxwell in athletics will be emotional the first few years, but football is the only sport affected by the board’s decision.
“I don’t understand why they can play us in every other sport but not football,” Luther said. “It will be hard on everyone, but we have to move on.”
Both Baxter and Collins-Maxwell will play athletically in the Iowa Star Conference next season. That means the schools will play against each other in volleyball and run against each other in cross country in the fall.
Luther wanted to play two games against the Spartans next season, one at home and one on the road, to complete a nine-game schedule. If that didn’t happen, Baxter was willing to play the single game in Maxwell.
CMB softball coach Troy Houge was recently hired as Collins-Maxwell’s athletic director starting in the fall.
He was not at the meeting that C-M’s board members voted against playing Baxter in football next season, but he also feels like playing against each other will be too hard.
“It’s going to be tough on the kids,” Houge said. “Football is the biggest sport of the year and it brings the most attention as far as media goes.”
Baxter and Collins-Maxwell have disagreed on a few things over the past few years, which ultimately led to a long-time athletic sharing agreement coming to an end.
This latest disagreement with football just appears to be another item the two schools couldn’t come to an agreement on.
Contact Troy Hyde at thyde@newtondailynews.com