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When the Lafayette Christian football team hits the field this fall, the Cougars will be playing what might feel like an entirely new sport in some ways. GAPPS, the athletic governing body that Lafayette Christian is under, is transitioning all schools from 8-man and 11-man football to 9-man football with the exception of four schools deciding to continue to play 11-man football.

For the past several years, the Cougars have been playing 8-man football after playing 11-man football previously. Just when the team was finding its rhythm in 8-man, GAPPS made the switch to 9-man football heading into the 2024-25 school years.

“We had kind of settled into a good spot with eight-man, you know, and we were doing pretty well and had a good understanding of what we and other teams wanted to do,” LCS coach Jarred Pike said. “The team is excited to take on the challenge and, and I’m interested to see how it all plays out.”

GAPPS is going through a transition period as they recently lost two of their top programs in Sherwood and Calvary Christian, who both moved to GISA.

The big change for LCS will not just be the number of players on the field, but also the width of the field itself. Under the new rules, the field will be the same width as an 11-man field (53.3 yards) instead of the 40-yard wide field that they had grown accustomed to playing 8-man football.

“As an offense it is exciting, but not so much for the defense,” Pike said. “For the defense, it is going to be a lot more space to cover and for the offense, there is going to be a lot more room to run around and get creative.”

With just one extra player to cover 13.3 more yards of field before the boundaries may lead to some high-scoring games that more closely resemble basketball scores.

“I think what we might just see like ridiculous scores. Especially if it’s like two teams are pretty quick,” Pike said. “There’s gonna be so much field to cover and only one extra guy to help cover it.”

Through this all, Pike hopes that low-scoring hard-nosed football games, like the Cougars’ 22-16 win over Praise Academy late last season and their 12-2 playoff loss to Central Christain, don’t go away.

“I don’t think we will have games like that this coming season and I like those kinds of games where you have to fight for every yard and every point. 

“I think where they’re gonna put themselves into is that they are going to end up with a bunch of trash games. Games where one team wins 80-10 because teams will not be able to rely on strong defenses like they have in the past, but we’ll see.”

The offenses will line up with three offensive linemen as is customary for 8-man football, but the teams will now have an extra skilled position player on the field and even more field to work with. 

Some teams will be affected by both the width and the length of the field. While the Cougars already played on a regular 100-yard football field, teams playing 8-man football in GAPPS were allowed to shorten their fields to 80 yards during the regular season. 

Pike and the Cougars as well as the other coaching staffs from around GAPPS are currently hard at work designing new game plans to adjust to this new frontier.

“We will have a whole new playbook, a whole new system. We’ve been working on it back in the spring and then we’ve met over the summer a couple of times as coaches to figure everything out,” Pike said. “The good news is we’re all on the same plane and everyone in the league will have to make adjustments.”