In Connecticut, as elsewhere, high school football faces a troublesome trend.
For the fifth time in the past six years, participation in Connecticut declined during the 2017-18 school year, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations. The total number of high school football players in Connecticut fell from 10,815 in 2009 to 9,241 in 2017, a 14.6 percent drop in only nine years.
Amid concern over head injuries, among other factors, fewer boys in Connecticut played football last year than at any other time in the past 15 years. And although data for the just-completed 2018 season won’t be released until next summer, the migration away from the sport doesn’t seem to have slowed.
“When I first got here [in the early 2000s], I had between 75 and 80 kids in the program. I have slightly over 50 now,” Hartford Public High School coach Harry Bellucci said. “I’m the only team in the city with a freshman program, and we have enough for a freshman program, but when you only have 50-something kids on a team it gets close.”
During the time high school football participation has dropped, total high school sports participation in Connecticut has risen slightly, largely due to increases across girls sports.
The most obvious and well-publicized explanation for the downward trend in football is the rising consciousness of the game’s risks. According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, 13 football players across all levels died nationwide in 2017 as a direct or indirect result of participation in the sport. And a growing body of research shows that repeated hits to the head, as experienced in the average football game, can have long-term effects, including Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
One recent study found a correlation between news coverage of traumatic brain injuries caused by football and a decline in high school participation in the sport.
“There clearly is a relationship that, as the media reports go up, and they go up quite precipitously [around 2010], that change is associated over time with the decline in participation rates,” said Chris Feudtner, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who authored the study.
A survey conducted earlier this year found that 46 percent of American parents (53 percent of mothers; 39 percent of fathers) say they would encourage their children to play a sport other than football. That figure is a sharp increase from a similar survey conducted in 2014.
Glenn Lungarini, executive director of the CIAC, the governing body for high school sports in the state, acknowledged parents’ concerns about safety but said the agency continues to explore ways to reduce head injuries in football practices and games
“I think the technology of safety equipment and quality of protocols taken is probably as good as they’ve been,” he said.
Many Connecticut schools have taken significant steps to reduce football’s risk. RHAM High School in Hebron, for example, has prohibited all player-on-player contact during practice.
But head injuries are not the only possible explanation for the decline in football participation. Nationally, athletes increasingly have chosen to specialize in one sport at young ages, rather than play several different sports, in hopes of receiving college scholarships, which could explain why fewer boys are playing football (along with baseball, lacrosse and other sports).
And Bellucci suggests another cause: rising costs. According to research from Utah State University, the average family of a youth football player spends nearly $3,000 annually in registration fees, equipment, travel and other expenses associated with the sport. Those costs can push kids toward less expensive sports.
“In the working-class towns, that’s a factor,” Bellucci said, “because it doesn’t really cost anything for a soccer ball and some shorts.”
It’s unclear whether kids who choose not to play football wind up choosing other sports or instead spend their time away from the field altogether. Over the past 10 years, participation in boys soccer and cross country (the other two CIAC-sponsored boys sports during the fall season) has increased slightly, but not enough to compensate for football’s decline.
Connecticut’s drop in high-school football participation follows a national trend in which fewer kids play football even as more play sports in general. The total number of high school football players across the United States dropped by more than 21,000 from 2016 to 2017, despite increases in participation in football-mad states such as Texas and Alabama.
Some of that decline might be due to a slight national decrease in the population of high-school aged males, but that demographic factor doesn’t appear to explain all, or even most, of the dip.
In a statement released along with the most recent participation survey results, NFHS executive director Karissa Niehoff mentioned fear of head-injuries as a specific cause of the national trend away from football.
“While there may be other reasons that students elect not to play football,” she said, “we have attempted to assure student-athletes and their parents that, thanks to the concussion protocols and rules in place in every state in the country, the sport of football is as safe as it ever has been.”
In Connecticut, the trend away from football appears to be accelerating: In two years, from 2015-17, the sport lost about 650 players, or roughly 6.5 percent of its total pool — and there’s little evident reason to expect a reversal. Head injuries remain part of the football conversation at both the national and local level, costs remain high, and specialization remains alluring.
And, as Feudtner points out, participation declines can compound quickly.
“To field a squad you need a minimum number of people, and to field a league you need a minimum number of teams, so there are going to be mounting problems as participation rates go down,” he said. “You don’t go down from 1,000 to zero one at a time. You go from 1,000 to 500 and then suddenly there are none.”
High school football in Connecticut won’t zero out anytime soon, but Bellucci sees a murky future. In 2014, Connecticut had 15 co-op football program representing 34 schools. By 2018, that number had risen to 18 programs representing 48 schools. The fewer kids who sign up for the sport, the more coaches who will be forced to team up with rival schools or even cut football altogether.
Bellucci said he’ll keep a close eye on participation trends moving forward.
“The next four or five years are crucial to football,” he said. “If we see a leveling off and we’re not losing any more kids, we’ll say, ‘OK now we can build from that, we’ve hit the bottom as far as that goes.’ But if the downward trend continues, yeah, I think it’s in trouble.”
