Earlier this spring when it was announced that Sioux City North would not be on South Sioux City’s football schedule for the coming 2025 season, it appeared the Cardinals would play an eight-game schedule.
Recent developments, however, have put a ninth game back on the schedule, as the Cardinals will now open the season on Friday, Aug. 29 at Yutan.
The change in the Cardinal schedule came earlier this spring when Iowa’s high school football scheduling would not allow for the return games for both Sioux City North and Sioux City West, both of whom have been traditional opponents on the SSC schedule during the non-district part of the season.
While Sioux City West remained on the schedule for a Sept. 5 appearance at the Cardinal Complex, the loss of Sioux City North was set to go down as a forfeit win for SSC, giving them an extra week of preparation before that first game in the season’s second week.
Recently, Oakland-Craig announced that it was cancelling all of its 2025 varsity games due to a lack of numbers on their roster. Their season opener was supposed to be against Yutan, and when that announcement was made, the door opened for both Yutan and South Sioux City to fill vacancies in their schedules.
It is almost a repeat of a similar situation that happened during the Covid pandemic five years ago, SSC athletic director Jeff Squier told the Dakota County Star.
“Flashback to the 2020-21 school year when some school districts and states played football and some didn’t,” he said. “Nebraska allowed schools to play and continued with the football cycle we were on, and opened it up for us to find our own opponents since not all school districts allowed for football to be played.”
Since Iowa chose not to play football, it put the two states on alternating two-year scheduling cycles.
“We’ve traditionally always played Sioux City North and Sioux City West and they’ve been 1 and 2 on our priority list when submitting our football schedule request (to the NSAA),” Squier said, noting that the two Sioux City schools did the same with their state’s scheduling setup.
“Since that 2020 year with Nebraska rolling their schedule and Iowa freezing theirs, we’ve been in a position where it may not always work and risked having them on the schedule the first year but not the second,” he said.
When told this past spring that Sioux City North would not be able to fulfill their commitment, Squier said the school looked for a replacement and were almost set to have an idle week for the season opener — until Oakland-Craig’s announcement.
“When that news broke and we saw that Yutan was their game the first week, the calls, e-mails and texts were flying,” Squier said.
Coincidentally, when the Covid scheduling happened in 2020, South Sioux City hosted Yutan — a game won by the visiting Chieftains, 54-14 — and now the two teams will meet again down in Yutan when the season opens Friday, Aug. 29.
