A small parachute trails behind Aviano’s Gabe Wood as he sprints along with teammates at the first day of fall practice at the school Aug. 4, 2025. (Kent Harris/Stars and Stripes)
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy — Football fans at the four Defense Department schools in Italy will see their favorite teams exploring new frontiers this fall.
Vicenza and Naples, the two schools south of the Alps with the system’s largest enrollments, are set to play at the Division I level for the first time. They’ll be paired along with Stuttgart and Vilseck in a southern section during the regular season.
Sigonella and Aviano, the Department of Defense Education Activity’s two smallest high schools in Italy, will be playing nine-man football.
The Saints didn’t field a football team a year ago for the first time in school history, while the Jaguars won the six-man championship last season.
Wildcats coach Jim Davis, whose teams have dominated Division II in recent years, said practices that started last week are pretty much the same. And largely, so is the game plan.
“You do what you are successful with,” he said.
That said, Naples likely will find itself with fewer players on the sidelines than its foes for the first time in quite a while.
“I’m pretty confident in our starting 11,” Davis said. “Our athletes will probably match up pretty well with the other teams. Depth might make a difference, though, when you’re playing the likes of Stuttgart.”
Still, Davis has said for a few years that he’d be OK with playing against larger schools as long as his team consistently did so.
“Even if we take our lumps, in the long run, we should improve,” he said. “I’d rather lose 24-14 than win 50-0.”
Sigonella coaches Shannon Burcham and Matt McKown might have a few advantages over some of their counterparts in the nine-man league.
Used to coaching 11-man football in the U.S., Burcham made the adjustment to the six-man level when he came to Sigonella a few years ago.
And McKown was the head coach for the Jaguars when they played in a short-lived nine-man league more than a decade ago. When that league folded, so did the Jaguars — until they joined the six-man league several years ago.
“Now we kind of get to mix the two together,” said Burcham, the head coach.
Adding two more linemen to many plays makes it more like 11-man football, McKown said.
With fewer players on the field and a propensity for big plays, six-man football “can look more like track than football at some times,” he acknowledged.
Nine-man football will allow the team to run varied plays from several different formations and make the team more unpredictable, he said.
“I think you’re still going to see a lot of offense,” he said.
And there are some rule changes. Quarterbacks in the six-man league are not allowed to run with the ball, for instance. They can in nine-man football.
The Jaguars expect to have about 25 players out for the team, about a third of the school’s male population. Aviano, with roughly the same population, expects to have a similar number of players, according to coach John Chance.
Girls are welcome to play football in DODEA-Europe, though not many do.
Chance said during practice last week that he’s never coached nine-man football but has been watching a lot of tape and gathering information where he can.
The two teams meet in the season opener at Aviano on Sept. 13. The Saints and Jaguars will be paired in a southern section along with Rota.
The team with the best record will likely advance to the championship game Oct. 31 against the top team from a northern section that includes AFNORTH, SHAPE and the International School of Brussels. The team with the best record will host.
Naples and Vicenza will play six games during the regular season and a possible two playoff games. The top two D-I teams from the south advance to semifinal games against the top two teams from the northern section — which is composed of Ramstein, Kaiserslautern, Wiesbaden and Lakenheath — on Oct. 24. The winners meet Oct. 31 at a site to be determined.
DODEA still is fielding a six-man league this season, with teams from the United Kingdom, Belgium and Germany set to participate.
