For the past six years, a sophomore geography class at Sioux Valley high school in Volga has tried predicting all seven winners of the state high school football championships. Their formula, however, isn’t based on wins, losses, collegiate recruits, or even seed points. They use geographic characteristics in their model.
“I’m a high school football coach, and I’ve taught in a couple of different communities. The first community I taught at was a more rural, off-the-distant path, school,” said Jordan Fast, social studies teacher at Sioux Valley. “We would go to the games down at the dome and kind of figured out, kind of guessed the winners based on some other categories we were thinking about, more than just the seed points.”
Fast teaches a variety of high school social studies courses. Each fall, his 10th-grade geography class is tasked with this unique project.
“I absolutely love it, because it’s a way we can teach some of the state’s standards in kind of an authentic and tangible way. Because one of the standards I’m required to teach is analyzing characteristics of population distributions and human migration,” Fast explained. “This is a great way to say “hey, we do it in this way,” and we look at South Dakota to do it.”
Some of the factors that Mr. Fast’s class look at is population, distance to a larger community, average daily attendance, and community income and growth.
“We’re not picking favorites,” stated Fast. “It’s what are some of the challenges that your community has to get over based on your geography, or based on your community income, or how fast your community is growing based on population trends.”
Mr. Fast is also currently an assistant football coach for the Sioux Valley football team, which makes picking football winners a natural fit. And while there have been conversations about doing this with other sports as well, football, for now, just makes the most sense.
“Football is the ultimate team sport. You need a lot of players, so there are less variables in terms of one school having a really good athlete,” Fast exclaimed. “There are more variables in other sports, and football is the ultimate team sport, so I think it’s the best representation of these statistics.”
Throughout the past five years, Mr. Fast’s class has an overall state football prediction record of 25-11. Even sometimes when one team is heavily favored, the class choice listens to the geographical formula.
“A couple years ago, we had Brookings playing Pierre, Brookings won the geography battle, even though they were the heavy underdogs,” chuckled Fast. “We’re just kind of looking at the statistics, we even cheer for the underdog, we’re not here for the record. But it’s been awkwardly accurate that we have a 70% career record in it.”
It's not about hurting feelings or about picking against certain schools. The goal is purely for fun, and to get kids thinking in geographical terms when it comes to a topic like high school football.
“It's something that the students look forward to. It’s something they ask about on day one,” said Fast. “So, if you take first-semester geography, you’re fortunate that you get to do this.”
This year, Mr. Fast’s sophomore geography class has chosen Faulkton Area (9B), Warner (9A), Parkston (9AA), Elk Point-Jefferson (11B), West Central (11A), Pierre (11AA), and Sioux Falls Lincoln (11AAA) to win state football championships.
State football will take place at the Dakota Dome in Vermillion on November 9-11. For options on viewing the games, click here.
