Fall sports practice has begun again in Libby and Troy high schools, both of which are experiencing some changes this year. Libby moves to class A , and Troy football moves to class C and from an 11-man team to an eight-man team.

Both changes are based on school population.

“I am excited to be back in class A,” Libby’s athletic director, Nik Rewerts, said via email. “We have a great relationship with the A schools and I am looking forward to this season.”

Troy High School’s new head coach of football, Greg Jonsen, said he hopes the change will make the team more competitive.

“It will be a new experience for us,” he said. “We’re moving to an eight man team, as opposed to 11 last year, and it’s now an 80 by 40 field. They’ve had to move the goals in a bit.”

The change may not mean much for Libby. Rewerts said that “class A and B really are not much different in competition. In the last two years (of class B), I truly feel the boys basketball B was better than A.”

Scott Funk, Troy football’s returning assistant coach, said he thinks the class C team will be more competitive against smaller schools such as Darby, Seeley and Arlee.

The eight-man game is “faster paced and employs different strategies,” said Jonsen, who was assistant coach last year and coached football at a college level at Adams State, Colorado. “There’s ultimately not as much passing, because you don’t have as much time to carry out formations and plays.”

Rewerts is accustomed to frequent changes in sporting classifications in Libby, having grown up there.

“In my graduating year, in 1999, Libby was class A, but when my father and mother started teaching in Libby back in the early 1980s we were AA,” he wrote. “We are the only school in Montana history to go B, A, AA, A, B, and with this change back to A.”