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in the next school year.
• Hotchkiss explained that Freeman started the football season last year with 17 players and ended the season with 11. With 46 eligible boys in the school, only 13 have expressed an interest in playing football this year.
• "I never imagined that we'd never a football team," Hotchkiss said.
• The superintendent said as many as six of the students who want to play football would be good additions to a neighboring program. The others are long on spirit but short on talent or size.
• "They're not varsity-caliber players," Hotchkiss said.
• Faced with Freeman's dilemma, SDHSAA's staff prepared a list of five options for the school district that ranged from dropping football to joining a co-op with another school to fielding a team with the players they have on hand. None of the SDHSAA options included a hardship exemption.
• Hotchkiss said most schools near Freeman wouldn't be interested in joining a cooperative agreement for football because the addition of the Freeman enrollment was sure to move them up to a higher division.
• "No one wants to co-op and move up," Hotchkiss said.
• Canistota has expressed an interest in forming a football co-op, he said, but the addition of Freeman students would push the football program from 9B to 11-man football. He said one option the board could consider would be allowing a Freeman-Canistota co-op and just raising the program to 9AA.
• Another option would be having the Freeman football players open enroll at another school, a choice that Hotchkiss said would have disastrous effects. If the students, who are among the school's best athletes, would open enroll in another school district and then re-enroll in Freeman for the second semester they would lose their eligibility to compete in athletics.
• "It will render us helpless" in basketball and track, Hotchkiss said. Losing those good players would leave the two sports "gutted'," he said.
• Hotchkiss suggested that the board could allow the Freeman students to play for Canistota without going through open enrollment, similar to the action they took with Marion basketball.
• Board member Dan Whalen of Pierre said that while Freeman's plight might be similar to Marion's basketball situation, there were significant differences. He reminded Hotchkiss that part of the problem for Marion and Canistota was a planned cooperative that failed due to a typographical error in the SDHSAA handbook.
• "I'm not suggesting that one shoe fits everybody," Hotchkiss said.
• To make matters worse for Freeman, the school district has lost its head football coach and has yet to have anyone apply for the job. Asked what will happen if

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