I see by your profile that you area teacher with 22 years under you belt, so I assume your sentence should have been structured as:
Actually a good number of my 8th grade, friends, as well as my family still claim the Yankees should be the winners.
Since I assume you don't really have friends that are in the 8th grade, and instead the 8th graders are your students. Is that a correct assumption?
No, in 1960 was in the 8th grade and I still count more than a few of those classmates as friends