Illinois High School Association members approved changing regular season and playoff scheduling to a district-based system beginning in 2021. (Photo courtesy of WJBC)

By Greg Halbleib

District scheduling is coming to Illinois high school football.

The Illinois High School Association on Tuesday announced schools narrowly approved the shift from conferences to districts beginning in 2021. The vote was 324-307 with 69 schools expressing no opinion. Each school is allowed one vote, and 702 schools, or 85.8 percent of the membership, cast ballots. Playoff classifications will be determined before the season. Schools will be organized in eight geographic districts in each of the eight classes with each district playing a round-robin schedule. Any remaining game dates would be scheduled by the schools. The playoff structure will remain eight 32-team classes with the top four teams in each of the eight districts advancing to the post-season.

IHSA spokesman Matt Troha said he realizes many want to know their district and classification now, but there’s a lot of work to be done first now that the concept has been approved. “We’re going to have to wait and see which co-ops are still together, our non-boundaried schools are sometimes multiplied,” Troha explained. “We’ll really have to see where those enrollments are so we can see what the classifications are. Then we can sit down and look at the map and draw out the individual districts.”

Troha said the football advisory committee and association staff will work throughout the next year to finalize the scheduling process.

“Knowing the actual classes is something we won’t be able to do until the football season prior to it finishes,” Troha said, adding that work on the process will begin soon.

Troha said this is the third time the question has come before the association’s membership in the last nine years, and appeared to reflect the difficulty of football scheduling for many schools.

“I think it shows how unstable conferences have been,” Troha said. “There were a lot of people in 2009 who said this doesn’t impact them. Fast forward to a decade later and you see that it passed, so I think a lot of people were affected by conference movement or an inability to schedule games.”

A more definitive timeline for releases of schedules and classifications will be developed during the next school year.

Greg Halbleib can be reached at [email protected].