The Eastern Connecticut Conference has lost one football-playing school next season but gained another.

Plainfield officially requested to opt out of playing a conference football schedule in 2022 at the league's athletic directors meeting on Wednesday.

Weaver will take the Panthers' place. The Hartford school restarted its program this past season after an eight-year hiatus and played a junior varsity schedule. It will play a varsity schedule and is coached by Jude Kelly, who has led St. Paul and Southington to CIAC state championships.

"Plainfield will not be a member of the ECC next year in football," said Ledyard athletic director Jim Buonocore, who serves as the ECC's football chair. "They decided to go independent. ... (Weaver) was voted in unanimously by the athletic directors as a single-sport member of the ECC for football."

Buonocore said Plainfield athletic director Jan Voland did not offer a reason for the school's decision to opt out in football only. A message left for Voland was not returned Wednesday night.

Plainfield is the second ECC program to go independent in the past several seasons. Woodstock Academy struggled earlier this decade, opted out of a league schedule in 2016 and played only small schools, tech programs and teams from out of state.

Woodstock began playing an ECC schedule again in 2019. It won the league's Division II title this season, the program's first title of any sort.

Buonocore said Plainfield's decision leaves it with just one game against an ECC opponent — Griswold/Wheeler on Thanksgiving. The Panthers' choice to go independent leaves them with limited options in-state with so many leagues filling out their respective schedules with Connecticut High School Football Alliance interleague games.

Buonocore said that Weaver athletic director Sterling Scanlon contacted him earlier this fall to inquire about the possibility of joining the ECC for football only. Buonocore told him at the time it was not possible because the league had an even-number of teams (14).

The Beavers will take the Panthers' place in Division III.

"After I became aware of Plainfield's desire to go independent in the last week-or-so, I reached back out to Sterling and we moved pretty quickly," Buonocore said. "The upside (to the league) is that Weaver is a school that is growing. It's a brand new building. They have brand-new facilities. If they ever get back to that level, we all know from the late nineties, early 2000s, they can become a valuable member of our league in the sport of football because we need more Division I and II type-of-schools. We know they're not there yet."

The ECC will continue to have a 4-5-5 divisional alignment in football:

Division I: East Lyme, Fitch, Norwich Free Academy, Woodstock Academy.

Division II: Bacon Academy, Ledyard, New London, Waterford, Windham.

Division III: Griswold/Wheeler, Killingly, Montville, Stonington, Weaver.

New London and Woodstock swapped places.

Division I and III teams will play one crossover game.

There will be two crossover games between teams in Division I and II, and teams in Division II and III.

The Alliance will help the ECC fill out its schedules. The Alliance formed in 2017 to help the Southern Connecticut Conference, the South-West Conference and the ECC with scheduling. All three leagues have schools of varying sizes, and each had programs that didn't want to play the larger and/or more successful programs. The Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletic Conference later came on board.

Everyone in the ECC will play at least one Alliance game next season. Norwich Free Academy, which has the eighth-largest boys' enrollment among CIAC member schools (982), will play four. Fitch will play three.

SCC commissioner Al Carbone, who, along with Buonocore, helps coordinate games within the Alliance, said that the entire Central Connecticut Conference, a few teams from the Pequot Football Conference and five teams from the Connecticut Technical Conference would play Alliance games next season.

Buonocore said both the Quinebaug Valley and Thames River co-ops have requested two Alliance games.

"There's a couple of schools in our conference that those games against (Quinebaug and Thames) make a lot of sense," Buonocore said. "They make a lot of sense geographically as well as competitively. I can't guarantee that's going to happen. We have a full complement of Alliance members."

The Naugatuck Valley League is the state's only conference that won't take part in the Alliance next season although there have been discussions between the two sides.

"The NVL is probably a year away," Carbone said. "They were worried about about what was going to be happenning with Derby (which forfeited its final five games due to low numbers this season) and they also had somebody else apply to the NVL, too (Gilbert)."

n.griffen@theday.com