BETHALTO - There’s a new spring football league for local middle schoolers.
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Trimpe Middle School, Jersey Community Middle School, Roxana Junior High School and East Alton Middle School have come together to create a football league for sixth, seventh and eighth graders. Trimpe Middle School Athletic Director Jeff Ochs explained the spring league allows more students to participate and learn the basics of football before joining their high school teams.
“The kids are basically going through the same thing we would go through in the fall,” he said. “The first few days are just getting acclimated to the equipment, things like that. And then on that fourth day, they started tackling, hitting and those things, just learning the proper ways to hit and tackle and play football the right way.”
The league aims to teach athletes how to play the game. Kids learn the basics of the sport and get practice competing against each other and as a team.
Ochs explained that Trimpe Middle School also recently added a middle school baseball program that plays in the fall. When the football program was previously scheduled for fall, many multisport athletes were forced to choose which sport to play. The spring football league gives the athletes more flexibility.
Additionally, there are more opportunities for the high school coaches to get involved since the high school football season does not overlap. As a result, high school coaches have been helping at practices and teaching the athletes the rules and techniques of the sport.
“High school coaches always want to be involved, but they can’t be because high school football season is very demanding,” Ochs explained. “They just couldn’t be involved with the middle school program because they were so involved with the high school program. Now, we're seeing all these high school coaches at all these middle school practices. These guys are able to come down and teach the way they want things taught and really work with the kids. And the kids are excited to see the high school coaches, which is really nice.”
Ochs said the spring football league has been in the works for over a year. He noted that they played football during the spring following the COVID-19 pandemic, and it worked well.
He is hopeful that this year’s league will also be successful so it can grow in the future. Trimpe Middle School alone has about 75 kids involved in the spring football league, and the other schools have also seen “really good numbers.” Ochs is excited to see the league continue to expand.
“Every school is seeing really good numbers of kids coming out, which is really exciting because it’s always scary when you make a change,” he said. “But we're hoping that we’re going to see a lot of benefits and that maybe other schools will want to jump in.”
On Saturday, March 29, 2025, the Trimpe Middle School teams play at 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. against Jersey Community Middle School at Civic Memorial High School. On Sunday, March 30, 2025, Roxana Junior High School takes on East Alton Middle School at 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. at East Alton-Wood River High School.
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