As my fellow writer, Elsa Kehoe, pointed out in her feature last week, the FHC football teams are switching to Division 3 for the 2023 season. Is this a good change for the team, or is there more downsides associated with Division 3 football than the upsides?

Playing football in Division 3 could have many positive things for our team. First off, the school itself still has a classification of “A” under the MHSAA. This means that the team is still part of the OK White Conference, and any in-conference rivalries, such as the “heated” rivalry against Forest Hills Northern, will remain intact. Another benefit to playing Division 3 football is the fact that the team was able to make it to the Division 2 state finals. If our team was good enough to beat teams like Mona Shores, East Lansing, and Dexter in the Division 2 playoffs on its way to making it to the state finals, who is going to say that we cannot do the same thing against smaller schools such as Detroit Martin Luther King, Brother Rice Bloomfield Hills, and in-conference teams like Lowell and East Grand Rapids? Of course, no matter the division, top teams are top teams for a reason, but the Rangers should thrive in the Division 3 playoffs against lesser teams such as Jackson, Coopersville, Zeeland West, and Cedar Springs.

Of course, as with any change, there are not only positive effects, and some of the effects on the team could potentially be negative. One potentially negative effect is having less experience against our playoff matchups. If you look back at the FHC football schedule since the 2020 season, the players who will be seniors on the team this upcoming season have seen or been a part of games against Mona Shores in the past three years. Some of the players, and head coach Tim Rodgers, probably know a few of Mona Shores’ most used plays by now, especially after that win in the postseason this past year. A team like Cedar Springs might end up as a potentially more dangerous team than Mona Shores next year simply because our team has zero experience against Cedar Springs or any of the Division 3 teams we have yet to face. Teams such as Lowell and East Grand Rapids are the exemptions since these schools are within the same conference as FHC during the regular season.

Even though our team is going up against some new opponents in the playoffs next year, the Rangers know how to handle new competition. In the previous season alone, some teams that the Rangers have not played since the 2019-2022 seasons, when our current seniors were freshmen, included: Reeths-Puffer, East Lansing, Dexter, and Warren De La Salle. The only team we lost to was De La Salle in the state championship. We were able to exceed even “expert” opinions! MaxPreps had Dexter ranked as the second best Division 2 team in the state, but we still came out on top. If the Rangers can have this amount of success in the Division 2 playoffs, who can say we won’t have the same success in Division 3?