OGDEN — St. Joseph Catholic High School administrators have been kicking around the idea of whether or not to add eight-player football to the school’s athletic offerings.

After a couple months of chatting about it, the decision is, yes, eight-player football is coming to the private school on Ogden’s east bench — in 14 months, anyway.

The school doesn’t have a head coach or equipment for said program and therefore hopes to play in fall 2023 to open the 2023-24 school year. SJCHS principal Clay Jones confirmed the developments to the Standard-Examiner on Thursday

Earlier this spring, the UHSAA opened the door for teams to play eight-player football after years of smaller high schools requesting such a setup for various reasons including low participation, declining enrollment, lack of success, or sometimes all of the above.

St. Joseph then explored the idea, but it was always going to be a tight squeeze — about four months, at most — to get a new program going in time for the 2022 season.

In an earlier interview, Jones said the biggest hurdle for the school would be whether or not it found a head coach willing to put in the time to build the program.

Turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered if SJC had a coach. Supply-chain issues have delayed the arrival of St. Joseph’s new football gear and equipment until late August.

“Logistics-wise, getting uniforms and all the equipment, all the things we really needed, not to mention getting a coach and doing it right, we decided to put it off for a year,” Jones said Thursday.

Consider that when Farmington High opened in 2018, Daniel Coats was named head football coach in December 2017 — eight months before the Phoenix first played a game in August 2018 — and it’s probably not the worst thing that St. Joseph is waiting for 2023.

Either way, though, St. Joseph has officially decided to add football for the first time in the school’s history. As recently as one month ago, that was still up in the air.

“The (school) community seemed to really rally around the idea of doing it,” Jones said.

Surveys were sent to the school community and they were supposedly well-met. Some respondents said they would donate time or money to get the program going.

At this point, though, it’s a bit unclear what St. Joseph would get from donations.

“Saying you’ll help and donating stuff is different from actually getting it done, that’s another reason that we kind of put it off so we’ll reach out to those folks who said, you know, ‘I’d be willing to help get it jumpstarted,’ because the initial cost is going to be a little high,” Jones said.

The other financial factor was whether adding football would drive up enrollment. Right now, Jones said it’s hard to tell if football will equal more students.

Seven other Utah high schools are planning on eight-player football in some fashion: Altamont, Monticello, Rich, Water Canyon, Monument Valley, Whitehorse and Utah School for the Deaf and Blind (Salt Lake City).

Altamont is restarting football after having not played since the 2018 season. USDB and Water Canyon are starting new football programs. Additional schools are rumored to be seriously considering the idea of eight-player football.

Since the schools are so spread out across the state, there’s talk of using a neutral site for some games to avoid one side having a six-hour bus ride.

Depending on roster numbers and other conditions, teams playing 11-player or eight-player football can choose to play against each other in either an 11-player game or an eight-player game, UHSAA assistant director Brenan Jackson told the Standard-Examiner in an interview earlier this year.

Schools that are eligible for eight-player football are 2A and 1A non-football schools as well as 1A football schools that have finished in the bottom three of the RPI rankings the last three seasons.

Most non-football schools play fall baseball, including St. Joseph, where Jones said the school will eventually play spring baseball once football is added.

Depending on how many fall baseball/non-football schools make the move to football, there could also be some effects in the upcoming UHSAA realignment that will be decided this December.

Some 1A football schools would ostensibly drop into an eight-player division and whether there remains a 1A classification for 11-player football would be unclear, as it would only have 6-7 teams.

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