District 9 Playoff Preview
Tagged under: District 9, News, Playoffs
Phil Myers | November 3, 2022
For those who are not familiar with District 9, it is one of the smaller districts in the state with 23 football teams. D-9 is mostly made up of rural communities, and therefore there are no 5A or 6A schools. District 9 only has two 4A schools and three 3A schools. There are six 2A schools, and the other twelve are 1A teams.
In District 9 if a team does not have a .500 record or better, they do not enter the playoffs. This year Elk County Catholic (7-2) and Otto-Eldred (6-4) elected to not get into the playoffs even with their winning records.
1A has the most teams in the post-season with six. All games this week, no matter what the classification, will be played this Friday night. The #4 seed Keystone Panthers (6-4) host the 5th seeded Union/AC Valley Falcon-Knights (5-5). Keystone defeated Union/AC Valley in the second game of the season. The winner of this game will meet top seeded Port Allegany Gators (9-1). The other side of the bracket has the #6 seeded Coudersport Falcons (6-3) flying into Brockway to meet the #3 seeded Rovers (6-4). Brockway toppled Coudy in the regular season. The winner meets the #2 seed and returning state finalist, the Redbank Valley Bulldogs (9-1).
2A has three teams participating. This Friday the #2 seeded Karns City Gremlins (6-4) will meet the 3rd seeded Brookville Blue Raiders (5-5) at Clarion University. Brookville won the regular season contest. The winner will face the #1 seed, the Central Clarion Wildcats (9-1).
3A has all three teams entered in the playoffs with St. Marys matching skills with Punxsutawney in DuBois in the opening round. The Flying Dutchmen of St. Marys are 6-4 and come in as the #2 seed. The Punxsy Chucks are seeded 3rd and have a record of 6-4 also. St. Marys won the regular season match-up. The winner will tackle the Clearfield Bison (7-3), the #1 seed.
Finally, in 4A the DuBois Beavers (5-5) will play host to the Juniata Indians (7-3) on Thursday November the 10th at Mansell Stadium. This is a sub-regional game featuring DuBois from D-9 and Juniata from District 6.
For any predictions of D-9 games, see Protime Predictions each week along with the Protime Panel of experts from across the state. Good luck to each and every team in the D-9 playoffs. Many are hoping for someone to return to the state championship game as Redbank did last year. The Bulldogs gave hope that D-9 will one day have a state champion of football. In the history of the PIAA football state championships D-9 has had 3 runners-up, but no gold medalists. All three finalists were in Class A.
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