Porters Chapel Academy and Ben’s Ford have rescheduled their football game for Sept. 28, nearly a month after it was postponed by Tropical Storm Isaac.

The game will be played at PCA next Friday, following several weeks of talks with not just the teams involved, but several others as well. To fit the District 4-A game onto the schedule, PCA had to cancel a non-district game against Tri-County. Ben’s Ford canceled one with Baton Rouge Home School, an independent team from Louisiana.

PCA coach Wade Patrick said several options, such as playing on Monday and Friday the week after the storm hit Mississippi and Louisiana in late August, were also discussed and dismissed for various reasons.

“We could have played Saturday or Monday, like the MAIS requested everybody do, but it’s not fair to Ben’s Ford to have to play with no practice time,” Patrick said. “The other option might have been playing a Monday and Friday game. We didn’t want to do that, either, for the safety of the kids.”

With an immediate makeup date not possible, Patrick said Sept. 28 became the most viable option. PCA only had four non-district home games on its schedule, two of them at home — Sept. 28 against Tri-County and Oct. 5 against Sylva-Bay. The other non-district games are this Friday at Benton and Oct. 19 at Manchester.

PCA and Manchester do not have a bye week on their schedules. Benton has one next week, and Sylva-Bay has one Oct. 12. Patrick figured those coaches wouldn’t want to go three weeks between games. That, along with Ben’s Ford’s game against a non-MAIS team, made Sept. 28 the easiest date to accommodate everyone.

That PCA gets to avoid playing Tri-County, which is the reigning MAIS Class A champion and also undefeated this season, is a competitive bonus. Patrick said it wasn’t a factor in the decision, though, and that Tri-County had been told early on in the rescheduling process that Sept. 28 was the most feasible date for PCA and Ben’s Ford to play.

“When I looked at it, everything came back to that date,” Patrick said. “It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, and trying to get rid of Tri-County. With us not having a bye week, it left us four playing dates we could choose from. Two were away dates that we owed teams, and the other was Sylva-Bay, which was our homecoming.”