Coach Mike Vance speaks with his Cheverus players at practice on Thursday. The Stags are returning to 11-man football this fall, playing in Class C South. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Officially, Cheverus High made the decision to return to 11-man football in February, three months after the Stags completed a dominant, championship season in their first year of eight-man football.

But Coach Mike Vance knew much sooner that Cheverus’ stay in eight-man football would be short-lived.

“It was basically last August when I looked around and realized we had 16 freshmen,” Vance said. “Without a middle school feeder program, we never know what we’re going to get. I looked around at the numbers and thought we’d probably go back to 11-man.”

This season, Cheverus, a school with a Class D enrollment that played in Class A as recently as 2018, will be playing in Class C South. C South is a tough seven-team league. Cape Elizabeth is the defending state champion. Leavitt of Turner and Wells are two other programs with championship pedigrees, and York and Fryeburg Academy are consistently competitive. Westbrook rounds out the league. The Stags open the season at Class B Falmouth and make a late-season trip to defending C North champion Winslow.

“It will be important for our guys to understand, the programs that we’re playing, some of them have had a lot of success,” Vance said. “They’re very consistent, very competitive programs. There’s good athletes on all of those teams. We’re facing some very good coaching staffs, too.”

The Stags’ 38-player roster is a bit smaller this season. Gone are eight key seniors from the 2021 team that featured a defense that didn’t allow a point over the final 22 quarters of the season, including a 56-0 thumping of Waterville in the Large School Eight-Man state championship game.

“We had very good players. You can’t overstate that,” Vance said. “We didn’t have many varsity level kids, but we had some good players. And some smart players. You can go a long way with a high-character group that’s intelligent.”

Running backs Matt Fogg and Rilan Smith and lineman Sawyer Merrill, the three senior captains, are the only players back who were full-fledged varsity players a year ago. Fogg is a returning starter at defensive end. He and Smith were the second-team backs on offense and each was successful. Fogg scored three touchdowns in a 48-0 rout of Mt. Ararat in the South final. Smith had three TDs against Waterville.

Cheverus running back Rilan Smith doesn’t think it will be tough to make the transition to 11-man football. “It’s just football at the end of the day,” he says. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Readjusting to 11-man football won’t be a major issue.

“I don’t think so. It’s just football at the end of the day,” Smith said.

Vance agreed, saying, “It’s more about getting kids ready to play varsity football of any kind.”

Class C South will be fourth different league for Cheverus in its last four seasons. The Stags were in Class A North in 2018. Then, when the MPA reclassified football and made Class A an eight-team league, Cheverus moved to Class B South in 2019 along with other former Class A schools Portland, Deering, South Portland and Massabesic.

Cheverus went 5-5 that season, but because of its roster limitations was unable to play any junior varsity games. With a projected roster of less than 30 players for 2020, and a strong desire to get its JV team back, Cheverus decided to play eight-man in 2020, joining 15 other schools that switched from 11- to eight-man football. Of course, the 2020 season never happened because of the coronavirus pandemic.

When word got out that Cheverus had more than 40 players and was sticking with its plan to play eight-man in 2021, rumbles of criticism soon followed. When the Stags, a Class A champion as recently as 2011, began to dominate, the criticism only grew.

Matt Fogg of Cheverus catches a punt during practice Thursday. He is one of three senior captains on the team. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

“Going to eight-man, we took a lot of backlash for it,” Fogg said.

Fogg understood why there were critics.

“They were questioning, why is a 40-man Cheverus team that was dominant back in the 2010s and used to play Class A, and now they have 40 kids and they’re playing as an eight-man team,” Fogg said.

But, Fogg said, the critics weren’t recognizing that the 16 freshmen and 10 sophomores had never played varsity football. Or, that Cheverus’ decision to move to eight-man made sense when it was made. Smith added people also weren’t acknowledging that “only 11 guys really played,” until the score got out of hand.

At Thursday’s practice, Smith was wearing a T-shirt that read “Cheverus 8-man Undefeated Football 2021 Champions.”

“It just fueled us, I guess. We thought it was funny that people cared that much about us,” Smith said.

There will likely be those who scoff at Cheverus choosing to play Class C. Why not go back to Class B, at least?

“We have 38 kids, but we’ve got like 10 linemen, so for us, that was an indicator that we’re probably not ready for (Class) B now,” Vance said. “We need a few more linemen to be competitive at that level. We have a lot of good kids, we just don’t have a lot of interior line of scrimmage players.

Cheverus players work on a punt formation during special teams drills at practice on Thursday. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

“We’d like to be back to playing everybody at the top, but we’re just not where we were 10 years ago in terms of enrollment and participation,” Vance continued. “We’re hoping to change that here at Cheverus.”

From Vance’s perspective, last year was the first step in that goal and did exactly what eight-man football is intended to do: It helped reverse a trend of waning participation and a slow slippage in competitiveness. The young players had a JV season. Enthusiasm for Cheverus football was revived.

The Stags may not be ready to take on the Class A powers yet, but they are back in 11-man football and a new set of opponents await.

“I think it’s really cool that we get to see more southern Maine teams that Cheverus has really never played against,” Fogg said. “I get to be part of it and hopefully make something of it.”