FB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[CarollFan]

Story on high school football enrollment. They show a map that indicates high school football enrollment in the Midwest and East coast mostly on the decline since 2008 yet in the South it has increased. IL indicated as decreased 25% or more.

[hazzben]

Story on high school football enrollment. They show a map that indicates high school football enrollment in the Midwest and East coast mostly on the decline since 2008 yet in the South it has increased. IL indicated as decreased 25% or more.

I wonder how much of this is owing to youth football playing time practices.

Half of the teams my 8th grade son plays only deploy a single team. They do this so that all the top players are on one team. 40+ kids out, but they will only play the best 15-18 kids. IMO it's all about youth coaches and their ego's, they want to win and go 7-1, rather than really develop all the players but go 4-4.

Fast forward to HS, our first opponent in 6A football this year does not have a sophomore team due to low numbers (Varsity is Top 5 in the state). Another top school in our league, at a HS with 4,000 kids, barely has enough for a freshman team (they run 3 teams in 8th grade but typically stack 1 team that will go 7-1 and two that will go 2-6 or 3-5). So many more examples I could cite.

It's clear that some programs know they'll have plenty of athletes, and have no problem running kids off who they don't project to play or might be a late bloomer. But when kids are going out for football in elementary school and barely seeing the field in 3rd or 4th grade, and not at all in 8th grade, there's a lot of attrition.

[New Tradition]

Story on high school football enrollment. They show a map that indicates high school football enrollment in the Midwest and East coast mostly on the decline since 2008 yet in the South it has increased. IL indicated as decreased 25% or more.

I wonder how much of this is owing to youth football playing time practices.

Half of the teams my 8th grade son plays only deploy a single team. They do this so that all the top players are on one team. 40+ kids out, but they will only play the best 15-18 kids. IMO it's all about youth coaches and their ego's, they want to win and go 7-1, rather than really develop all the players but go 4-4.

Fast forward to HS, our first opponent in 6A football this year does not have a sophomore team due to low numbers (Varsity is Top 5 in the state). Another top school in our league, at a HS with 4,000 kids, barely has enough for a freshman team (they run 3 teams in 8th grade but typically stack 1 team that will go 7-1 and two that will go 2-6 or 3-5). So many more examples I could cite.

It's clear that some programs know they'll have plenty of athletes, and have no problem running kids off who they don't project to play or might be a late bloomer. But when kids are going out for football in elementary school and barely seeing the field in 3rd or 4th grade, and not at all in 8th grade, there's a lot of attrition.

This is a wild trend that has been going on for a bit longer than 2008, I think.  I attended Glenbard North.  My freshman year of high school football season was 1998 and we had 110 freshmen out.  For the entirety of my high school playing career, we had Varsity, JV, Soph A, Soph B, Freshmen A, and Freshmen B--each with a full 9 game schedule.  Furthermore, we had enough kids leftover on the Freshmen B team to run 3-4 C games per year and a handful of "fifth quarters."  By the time I started coaching in the 2007 season, we were already down to 60 Freshmen and 35-40 sophs.  I'm not sure how much water this holds, but the rationale we came up with at the time was that there were a lot of concerned mothers not letting their sons play due to all the concussion hysteria that started in 2005.  I didn't realize that the declining player number trend wasn't nationwide, though.  I find that super interesting.

[Gregory Sager]

I wonder if the bigger problem might be CTE. The more former players who are examined (especially postmortem) the more it becomes clear that the issue with football-related brain injury is even more pervasive than was thought even a few years ago.

The question is how much correlation there is between the proportionally dramatic increase in youth soccer participation and the decline in youth football participation everywhere outside the South, with the corollary question being how much of that shift from football to soccer, if it is indeed causative, is the result of parental choices in light of the relative health aspects of the two sports.

There are probably multiple reasons at work in the long slow death of youth and high school football north of the Mason-Dixon Line (remember, we were discussing this very subject on this board a decade ago). Some of it could come down to the simple explanation that Gen Z has difficulty touching grass.

[USee]

Greg, I can't speak for everyone, but the three of us who have been here for a decade or more are probably too old to remember anything, let alone a discussion on youth football attrition.

[Gregory Sager]

Heh. Well, too old to identify the exact year, perhaps, but not too old to remember the conversation taking place.😉

[CardinalAlum]

Greg, I can't speak for everyone, but the three of us who have been here for a decade or more are probably too old to remember anything, let alone a discussion on youth football attrition.

I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday!

[Gregory Sager]

North Park preview is up on the NPU football page.

The preview injects a little mystery into the QB question, but I don't think that there's any doubt that the job belongs to Paul Palmer. The foot he broke in his one start last season is fully healed, and he looked sensational against a better-than-usual Lake Forest team two weeks ago.

I'm guessing 4-6 this season. I'm hopeful for a return to 5-5, but i wouldn't be shocked by another 3-7.