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As one of two remaining charter members of the Nebraska Six-Man Football Coaches Association, a group that formed after the Nebraska School Activities Association stopped sanctioning their division because of dwindling numbers, Arthur County's Scott Trimble gets to be the secretary.

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AP Photo/Nati Harnik

With smaller rosters and a smaller field, six-man practices have a very different feel.

It's a position he was "appointed" to and one the good-natured Trimble figures "I'll never get out of."

Part of his duties require that he be the "master schedule-maker," a title that really doesn't seem all that big a deal, considering that only 13 six-man teams are playing across the state this season.

Except that Nebraska, though sparsely populated at around 1.7 million, is a big chunk of real estate. And if Trimble were to schedule Sioux County to play at St. Edward, well, he'd be sure to hear about it from the folks in Harrison and the surrounding area in extreme northwest Nebraska.

According to Trimble's mileage chart, it's a 371-mile drive from one school to the other.

Now there's a logistic most coaches in the eight- and 11-man divisions will never have to deal with.

"My first thing [with scheduling] was [figuring] distance," said Trimble, who, because of the odd number of teams this season, had to give each one an off week, regardless of whether their preference was to have a seven- or eight-game regular season.

Trimble's team wrapped that up Friday with a winding 184-mile trip over two-lane highways to Greeley, and dropped a 34-18 decision to Greeley-Wolbach, the state's lone unbeaten six-man outfit. Arthur County's only other loss came in mid-September after it had traveled similar roads 221 miles to face St. Edward.

"Six Man, Texas"

Everyone knows football is big in Texas. Even in the smallest of towns, football is a way of life. The film "Six Man, Texas" examines a town that is struggling to survive and keep its schools open while rallying around its six man football team.

Check out clips from the film:
Small town, big football dreams..
How the game is played.
Aquilla, Texas: A six man football town.
Coaches: What makes six man special.

For more on six-man football, check out Jeff Miller's feature on Texas six-man football and his look at the state's six-man mercy rule.

"We wanted to see some new faces, so let's go to some new places," Trimble said of putting his club on an old charter bus. (The Arthur County school district doesn't have a bus service.)

On the trip to St. Edward, Arthur County arrived barely an hour before opening kickoff, about half the time its coach prefers his club to have to get ready to play.

Trimble blamed the late arrival on "a mis-estimate of travel time, to put it politically correct."

He noted later, while watching the film of that contest, that it was easy to tell his squad had to shake off the effects of the five-hour-plus trip. Arthur County fell behind early by 34 points, then got within a touchdown before losing 48-36.

"We very well will go there in the second round [of the playoffs], and trust me, we'll go eight hours before kickoff," Trimble said.

Arthur and St. Edward will get paired up in the Nov. 6 semifinals only if things fall according to the first-round seedings, which, not surprisingly, are determined through a "ruler method" that places the top four westernmost teams in one bracket and the top four easternmost clubs in the other.

After those games, the field goes to a true 1-through-4 seeding based on a power-points formula similar to what the NSAA uses. Geography isn't considered.

The goal, of course, is to get the best possible matchup for the championship.

And for the second year, the title game, to be played on Nov. 13, will be held at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.

"We didn't need to legitimize six-man to ourselves," Trimble said. "But if we had the game [at] some [recognizable] place, that would be one less thing people could use to say it's not a big deal."

Since losing NSAA recognition, the six-man championship had gone from being held in the home stadium of the Nebraska Cornhuskers in Lincoln to the tiny community of the team with the top power-point average.

Granted, moving the game to a neutral site means Arthur won't be able to host a final at a site that USA Today in 2001 named as one of the 10 great places to watch a high school game.

But hear what Elba's Jed Dush told reporters last year after leading his team to a 59-32 title-game win against Arcadia before a Kearney crowd of 2,251:

"I've never been to Lincoln or to Kearney, so this is the most people I've ever seen in the stands watching football," he said. "It's just been awesome, the whole experience."

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AP Photo/Nati Harnik

Six-man football championships attract a crowd in rural Nebraska.

In a version of football that credits its beginnings to 1934, when a high school coach from Chester, Neb., named Stephen Epler wanted to find a way for his students to play the game, Dush ran for 192 yards and a touchdown on 15 carries, caught four passes for 113 yards, completed six of 12 throws for 93 yards and another TD, had 10 tackles, and returned an interception for a third score.

Without Dush this season, an Elba team that had one senior on its 13-player roster went 3-4 and missed the playoffs.

"We won the championship in 2000," Trimble said. "The next year we won two games because we had four studs graduate."

Sounds more like something that would decimate a basketball team. But in the wide-open six-man game -- in which the quarterback can't run the ball past the line of scrimmage if he takes a direct snap but everyone is an eligible receiver -- having four studs is a recipe for a lot of blowout victories.

"I think it's a harder game for athletes to play," Greeley-Wolbach coach Bill Steele said. "You've got to throw, run, catch, open-field tackle -- and if you can't do that, that's a problem."

Steele is in his second year as Greeley-Wolbach's head coach. Last year, his club played in the smaller of two eight-man classifications.

"The biggest transition for them was to realize that they're all a threat [on offense]," Steele said, "and every week we've played they've gotten better about that."

Steele's also come a long way in his six-man knowledge since he graduated from Nebraska-Kearney. He remembers being asked during his first job interview at a Kansas school what he knew about the game. Steele wasn't applying for the coaching position, but the question made him go back to then-Kearney coach Claire Boroff.

"I asked, what do I need to know? He said, 'Blocking, tackling, running, catching and passing -- it's pretty much the same [as eight- and 11-man football],'" Steele recalled.

His introduction to the six-man game wasn't much different from what Trimble faced when he came to Arthur County 13 years ago.

Trimble had grown up in a small Montana town where they didn't field a high school football team, so he ended up gravitating toward basketball. But when a position that included the head basketball and football coaching jobs at Arthur opened up, Trimble told his interviewers "of course" he could coach football.

"My philosophy was, it was a sport," he said. "I could learn strategy. I could learn technique.

"I was lucky, though. I came in '96, and '94 was a state championship, so I had some quality film and a couple seniors that I could go to and ask, 'Hey, what did you do here?' We made it to the quarterfinals that year."

Obviously, Trimble has become a little less reliant on his players for game plans.

Now, if only he could devise a scheduling formula so a six-man football team's school never has to close for the day because most of its students are on an all-day road trip to the next game.

"Whenever we have football and volleyball together, school is not going to happen, because I take 16 of the 18 boys and volleyball takes 10 of 13 girls," Steele said. "There's only eight kids in junior high, and half of those help out with the teams."