How Minnesota’s high school football schedules are made

Creating football team schedules for hundreds high schools across Minnesota requires a heavy diet of spread sheets. Complicated, color-coded ones.

These documents are a necessity when dealing with so many variables to ensure every eight-game schedule, for each team, fits specific needs from traveling constraints to annual rivalry games.

For Spring Lake Park activities director Will Wackman and Minnetonka director of activities Ted Schultz, it’s just business as usual.

Wackman, along with Reed Hornung, the athletic director at St. Thomas Academy, is in charge of creating football schedules for teams in Class 5A. Schultz, meanwhile, leads a committee of Twin Cities-area athletic directors that include Blaine’s Shannon Gerrety, Lakeville North’s Mike Zweber and Mounds View’s Jim Galvin in charge of creating schedules for Class 6A, the classification for the state’s largest schools.

Both committees lean heavily on organizational flow charts to track copies of paperwork that go into the creation of schedules.

“Every team wants to be 8-0,” Wackman said. “But that’s not realistic. Our ideal schedule would be for every team to go 4-4. To create a schedule that is a challenge for every team, but we haven’t achieved [that] yet.”

How exactly then do football schedules get made for the nearly 300 high school teams in Minnesota? Strib Varsity went deep on the topic to find out.

How we got here

The Minnesota State High School League voted in 2014 to create football schedules that align with a team’s section rather than its conference affiliation. The reason? Officials wanted to level the playing field by grouping teams against similarly-sized schools.

With so many head-to-head battles during the regular season, disputes over postseason section seeding have all but disappeared.

Class 6A dates to 2012 and was structured to include the 32 largest schools in the state, with some schools moving up from Class 5A or dropping from 6A to 5A to maintain that total.

Scheduling’s first steps

For all seven of the state’s classifications — Class 6A to Nine-Player — schedule creation begins when the MSHSL announces the section alignments within each class, which occurs every two years.

The MSHSL released its most recent section and district alignments in July 2025. So this fall, almost all of the teams in the state will play the same opponents as they did in 2025, flip-flopping games between home and away.

In each MSHSL-sponsored activity, teams are divided into eight regional sections within a class. For classifications other than Class 6A, sections are divided into districts, with anywhere from five to eight teams in a district.

In 6A, teams are divided into four, eight-team sections, grouped geographically: North, South, East, and West. That number sets up perfectly for a single-elimination bracket, with the quarterfinals considered the state tournament.

Here’s the breakdown from the MSHSL on how teams are classified:

Class 6A: The largest 32 schools.

Class 5A: The next 48 schools/cooperatives.

Class 4A: The next 48 schools/cooperatives.

Class 3A: The next 54 schools/cooperatives.

Classes 2A and 1A: After the largest 182 programs are separated into classes, schools/cooperatives with enrollments of 150 or fewer are divided equally into two groups based on enrollment. The bigger schools make up Class 2A. The rest go to Class 1A and Nine-Player.

The MSHSL requires that teams play a full district schedule to be playoff-eligible. Once district opponents are scheduled, the remainder of the regular-season schedule will be filled out. Teams can have as many as three crossover games with teams from another district within the same section, or, with permission from the MSHSL’s placement committee, games can be played against teams from other districts.

Some teams prefer to limit how far they travel, while others say they’ll travel as far as needed to play a competitive game.

“The original goal was to make sure everybody gets eight games,” Schultz said. “We don’t want teams to have to play each other twice during the season or have to travel long distances or go out of state to find games. One year, we had to go to Arrowhead [in suburban Milwaukee,] Wisconsin. We don’t have to do that anymore.”

How scheduling works

Football scheduling is certainly more orderly and refined than it was a decade ago, but the process is far from simple. The heavy-lifting in terms of creating a schedule looks like this:

Assuming each section has the preferred six to eight teams — a number that isn’t always reached — they are divided into districts for scheduling. That generally means at least five games are largely set for the season. “That usually leaves weeks 1, 2, and 8 open as wild-card dates,” Wackman said.

Committees for each classification send surveys to each school asking for their preferences for the upcoming season, where schools can list preferred dates for homecoming games and other special recognitions, but also note who they’d like to play, and, far more often, teams they don’t.

“For the wild-card games, we look at things like the relative strength of each team and their expectation for the season and take that into consideration,” Wackman said.

With the 32-team structure, Class 6A schools often don’t have the flexibility of smaller schools.

Athletic directors charged with creating the 6A schedules make it a point to avoid unrequested crossover games.

“We have a couple of guiding principles: Making sure the districts align as closely as possible to the sections themselves, and offering alternative scheduling, also known as schedule relief, to teams that ask for it,” Schultz said. “It’s worked quite well for us.”

Teams from Class 5A and 4A, however, often crossover outside their classes and play each other. While the need for games between classes is less pronounced, it does happen, often at the request of the teams.

After weeks of collecting surveys and formulating schedules, new schedules are usually produced in the early spring and sent to schools in each district for approval.

Teams can register complaints and dispute games, but scheduling committees often anticipate dissatisfaction, taking steps to find a solution that can be agreed upon. It’s rare that a committee forces a team to accept a game they do not want, but it does happen.

“If a team really doesn’t want to play a game, we’ll talk to them about about that, but in the end, they just may have to play that game,” admitted Schultz.

Added Wackman: “Sometimes, a team gets into a situation where a team doesn’t want to play a certain team for whatever reason and doesn’t know what to do. I always say, ’Hey, we can help you. You’re not stuck.’ It doesn’t happen all the time, but usually we can make sure to you get competitive games. For a lot of teams, that’s all they want.”

Tweaks may be made, but most coaches, grateful the scheduling has been done for them, give their approval.

The schedules are then sent to the MSHSL for final approval before becoming official.

The schedule makers in each class hope to get a jump on the 2027-28 season after the MSHSL releases its next biennial reclassification of teams.

“I talk to Ted [Schultz] all the time. And [Class 4A chairman] Eric Brever has become one of my best friends,” Wackman said. “What we are always hoping to do is make the schedules bigger, make them better and create a template for following seasons. We’re getting there.”