AUSTINTOWN — In the year 2022, the world of football, from the professional ranks to preps are undergoing plenty of changes. Every fall there’s a new set of challenges that coaches and programs face around the state.

For Austintown Fitch, just filling out a ten-game schedule was a journey itself, or a “nightmare” as coach TJ Parker put it.

When fans pile into Falcon Stadium in a few weeks, they’ll watch their representatives bearing the navy and red of Austintown facing off versus a very unfamiliar opponent; the Foothill Falcons of Henderson, Nevada.

As interesting as that may be, Fitch will also host Lewis J. Bennett from Buffalo, New York in week five.

This is the reality of football in this day and age for some programs.

“From the time the season ended all the way until school ended, (athletic director Russell Houser) are I were in communication at least once or twice a week about balancing; here’s who we can get, here’s who we can call,” Parker said, having to fill a schedule after teams declined to renew contracts late in the process. “Houser and I got involved with a couple of different people, through just networking and the first one was an organization that set us up with out-of-state teams looking for travel games.”

Foothill was looking to plan a trip for their team, then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, striking down their opportunity to see a team from another area of the country for a few seasons.

Sometimes things tend to just work out, with the Foothill team having the opportunity to attend a Pittsburgh Steelers practice and take a tour of the Pro Football Hall of Fame during their trip to Ohio. Foothill alum Miles Killebrew is a safety for the Steelers.

According to records obtained by the Tribune Chronicle, Austintown is paying approximately $8,000 for the trip, not including final busses and mileage expenses.

Fitch will be footing the bill for Lewis J. Bennett’s hotel rooms Thursday evening prior to the week five matchup, costing around $3,000. Austintown does not have a home and home agreement with either school.

Pennsylvania starts their football season one week later than Ohio, making a contest with a team from just east of the border out of the question for the Falcons’ week one opening. Add onto the fact that different states and conferences each have their own schedules, and it ends up being a headache to try and sort through.

“It was just so late. A lot of the schools that had openings were down in Cincinnati, down in the Steubenville-area or Toledo. So were we weighing how far do we want to travel for this? Do we want to bring somebody here? It’s tough,” Houser said. “We were actually in talks with another school from New York and were pretty deep with them but that fell through, and (Bennett) had heard kinda through them that we were looking.”

“The one piece of advice that I got when I took the job was that as an independent, it’s going to be hard to schedule, especially for football, but you might have to wait until the 10th, 11th or 12th hour to get something done.”

Fitch does face-off versus Warren G. Harding (home), Boardman (home) and Ursuline (away), but loses Chaney, Cardinal Mooney, and Canfield from their 2021 slate. This fall, Parker’s team will also see Canton McKinley and GlenOak at home and travel to Massillon Washington, Strongsville and Wadsworth.

They hope that the extra home game will help recoup some of the losses incurred with booking the two out-of-state schools, while also helping to build Austintown’s brand on a national stage.

As it turns out, having to perform magic with the schedule is nothing new to Fitch, who welcomed in M.M. Robinson from Canada back in 1993, one of the first schools in Ohio to do so.

Austintown was a founding member of the original Steel Valley Conference in 1949, but when they left in 2003 for the Federal League, scheduling versus other local teams hasn’t always been the easiest. An independent in football for over a decade now, they are in a weird position where they’re too big for the smaller schools, but not sizable enough to compete versus the monolithic schools of the state.

“It’s a delicate balance of trying to say that we’ll play anybody we need to, but we have to adjust our schedule to be realistic with who we have our team as well,” Houser said. “It’s just the reality we have moving forward. We’re looking to get into conferences, and we’ve approached a couple of conferences, maybe as a scheduling affiliate or an associate member just in football, but it’s tough right now.”

Parker feels that the 2022 schedule is what’ll prepare his team for the tough journey this season, understanding that every single game will test his team’s mettle with no opportunity to step off the gas.

Uncharted territory, however, always brings a new element to the table.

“I believe that part of coaching and being a head coach and running a quality program is making sure the teams that you have are prepared for your schedule and balancing that out,” Parker said. “When you’re starting to get teams from out of state, you really don’t know what to expect year in and year out.

“The unfamiliarity is there and that makes things stressful. You don’t know if they have a loaded freshman who’s going to be coming up, it makes it tough. You schedule these games sort of blindly and you want to have enough games where you test your team.”