VALLEY CITY, ND  (NewsDakota.com)  With a realignment plan taking shape, 9-man schools asking for a limit on teams, and two area teams refusing a co-op offer, the options for football at Barnes County North are dwindling.

The Bison had been in a productive co-op agreement with Valley City through the 2024 season.  However, when realignment planning began, the enrollment numbers showed that the Hi-Liners, on their own, were a A division team.

With Barnes County North, the team became an AA team.

Valley City’s school board voted to end the co-op, barring an emergency waiver from the North Dakota High School Activities Association that would allow the team to play in the A division as a co-op.

The realignment meeting took place Tuesday, followed a release of the new football plan.

Barnes County North, with an adjusted enrollment of 33 males, is listed as an “other member school”, meaning that their team is not included in any of the four divisions of North Dakota football, and also is not included as an independent six-man team.  Six-man football is a division that is not sponsored by NDHSAA, but is tracked by the association.

An emergency co-op waiver with Valley City brings certain conditions.  One is that a co-op must be in place for the second year of a football plan, in this case, meaning the 2026-27 year.  The other major consideration is that only seniors from the co-oping school would be eligible for varsity play.

Dissolving the co-op allowed Valley City to drop their number to 135.10, allowing them to be smaller than Wahpeton and Kindred, forcing Kindred to move up to the AA division, and moving the Hi-Liners to A.  Kindred’s adjusted enrollment is listed at 156.10.  Valley City and Barnes County together would be just over 168.

Based on numbers from the Department of Public Instruction, the combined enrollment of Barnes County North and Valley City will drop by seven students in the affected grade levels in the 26-27 projections.  Assuming roughly half of these are males, the expected drop would be either three or four students.

Kindred, the smallest AA school, also loses students in it’s sixth grade class, so the drop in the combined VC-BCN number will likely not be enough to have the co-op smaller than Kindred.  Should the co-op be reformed, it would be likely that Kindred would move to A, and VC-BCN would be AA.

Stacy Schaffer, the Athletic Director at Barnes County North, tells NewsDakota.com that the Bison have approached both Griggs-Midkota and Maple River, the co-op of Maple Valley and Hope-Page, about a co-op.  Both have refused, as the added enrollment would push their teams to the A 11-man division.

Schaffer says they will attempt to schedule discussions with both Valley City and Jamestown.  With the aforementioned math in enrollment, Valley City would have a very difficult decision to make on reforming the co-op.  Jamestown is entrenched in the AA division, and could absorb the players from BCN with affecting their classification.

Barnes County North starting their own nine-man team seems out of the question.  Nine-man football playing schools asked NDHSAA to limit the number of teams in the nine-man division to 40, and to place them in regions of 10 teams.  A 41st team would not be accepted, as a region would have to expand to 11 teams, something scheduling does not allow for.

The Bison could start a six-man team, although the response to that idea has been lukewarm.  However, that was before possible co-ops were turned away, and Schaffer says BCN will consider many options to offer football to it’s students.

Six-man football would be a haul for the Bison.  The nearest opponents are in Drayton and Warwick.  Other six-man teams include Center-Stanton, New Town, Trenton, Parshall, White Shield, and Mandaree.