On Oct. 18, the varsity football team will travel to Salina South for their last regular season game on a Thursday night, due to the Salina high school’s shared football stadium.

Both Salina South and Salina Central share the same stadium like many other teams in the league including Goddard and Andover. When the league sets the home and away schedules for the teams, these schools are forced to play on Thursdays, when both teams are scheduled for home games. According to senior Zach Garcia, this has affected how the team has played the week leading up to the game.

“It definitely messed with our whole practice schedule because no one is used to coming into a game this early without getting everything fine tuned. We really had to speed things up at practice this week,” Garcia said.

Based on the outcome of the game, Newton will have a chance to host the first round of playoffs at home, which according to athletic director Brian Becker, has not happened since the late 2000’s.

“It’s about 50/50 tonight-if we win tonight and we win by the 13 point margin that we need to maximize our point differential. Certain teams have to lose and certain teams have to win,” Becker said. “There is a really good possibility that we can rank as high as 6 or 7 which would give us the chance to have a home playoff game.”

In addition to the Railers winning the Salina South game, Maize, Valley Center, and Goddard-Eisenhower have to lose their games in order for the Railers to host playoffs.