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Football coaches across New Jersey, which has packed lineups with N.F.L. stars for decades, are asking the same question this fall: Where have all the players gone?
Rich Hansen, the football coach and athletic director for 31 years at perennial power St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, began listing off the schools he knew of that had struggled to field a team in a state that has long been a college recruiting hotbed.
“Glen Ridge, Marist, Montclair Immaculate, Montclair Kimberley, Morris Catholic, Dickinson — it’s an epidemic,” Hansen said.
The latest active participation numbers, which were released in August, showed a drastic statewide decline for the second consecutive year: The 2017 high school football season featured nearly 1,700 fewer players than the year before, a downturn of 6.8 percent. Only three other states, Colorado, Montana and Oklahoma, had steeper drops.
The primary reason New Jersey’s proud high school football tradition is plunging toward irrelevancy is the growing concern about head injuries, many coaches and administrators said. That aligns with national data collected by Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, who has been studying the decline in football participation.
Football remains the nation’s most popular sport for boys ages 14 to 17. But since 2009, when a record 1.14 million athletes participated in 11-player high school football, interest has fallen. The sport drew 1.03 million participants in 2017.
Though Pielke is careful about ascribing direct causation, he notes that the biggest drops occurred after the 2012 suicide of Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau (who was later found to have C.T.E., the degenerative disease linked to repeated blows to the head) and the release of the movie “Concussion” in 2015.
“You always want to be careful calling something a ‘peak,’” Pielke said. “But it is robust enough now that I’m writing up all this data.”
Mike Warnock, the head football coach and a math teacher at Metuchen High School, does not need national numbers to understand what is happening at his school. Metuchen recently forfeited a game for the first time in its program’s nine-decade history. The reason? Not enough players.
In his math class for the past 16 years, Warnock has handed out a questionnaire at the start of the school year to try to learn more about his students’ interests. Now he studies those forms, tracks down students who are not playing sports and pitches them on high school football.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, you don’t play any sports in the fall,’” Warnock said. “‘You can play football. What’s keeping you from playing?’”
The drop in football participation in New Jersey last year was far greater than for other sports. Girls’ soccer had the second-biggest decline, losing 577 players from 2016 to 2017, or 3.8 percent. Boys’ soccer participation dropped by 979 players, or 0.6 percent.
It appears the outlook for football is even bleaker in 2018. Multiple schools, including Roselle Park, a three-time section state champion, recently suspended their programs or dropped down to a junior varsity schedule because of low turnout. Others, like Metuchen, were barely hanging on.
“The numbers don’t lie,” said Ken Mason, athletic director at West Windsor-Plainsboro, whose two high schools, North and South, merged football teams this season to account for a decline in players.
“Since we’ve done it,” Mason added, “I’ve gotten a million phone calls asking how.”
In interviews, coaches and administrators across the state largely agreed about causes, but they had few solutions. Town demographics are changing, they said, and students’ interests are shifting toward activities like soccer and basketball, the fastest-growing sport in the state. Others point to the increasingly year-round demands of football, which cut deeper and deeper into summer vacation.
But safety concerns remain the primary cause of the shift, coaches said. Pielke said New Jersey’s statistics jumped out at him, in part because of its history as one of the Northeast’s gridiron strongholds.
Joe Theismann played football in the state, as did Franco Harris, Bill Parcells and Victor Cruz. Minkah Fitzpatrick, the No. 11 pick in the 2018 N.F.L. draft, hailed from Old Bridge. Tom Lemming, a football recruiting analyst for CBS Sports Network, puts New Jersey’s Catholic schools at the top in the nation as feeders for programs like Alabama, Michigan, Penn State and Notre Dame. New Jersey is also the first state in the nation to begin using video review extensively, even in regular-season games.
But there has been an erosion of players at the smaller schools, particularly ones that populate Group I and Group II — the smallest schools — in the state’s athletics classification system. That includes Metuchen.
The trend has drawn enough concern that the North Jersey Super Football Conference, a 115-team megaleague formed in 2016, is discussing creating a developmental division for schools struggling to field a team, affording them a less competitive schedule as they rebuild, according to Hansen, a conference vice president.
He said he was also in favor of restricting off-season activity for teams that now routinely meet throughout the summer, which drains vacation time for students and families.
“Football is no longer just mid-August through late October,” said Ryan Horan, the athletic director at Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair. Though football was the only sport offered to boys in the fall, the team was down to 16 players four years ago.
Horan said that the program had since bounced back to 40 players this year, but it had taken great effort. “It’s sadly become almost year-round,” he said of the sport.
He recalled pleading with a parent to let her son play, even as she worried about head injuries. Horan eventually convinced her that playing football would help him improve at his better sport, track. “If I can win over the mother,” he said, “it’s pretty easy after that.”
Efforts to make football safer and more inviting include less hitting in practices and the use of soft-shell helmet covers called Guardian Caps, which are intended to decrease the risk of head injuries. Yet despite those changes, coaches like Warnock are still devoting considerable energy to maintaining or expanding rosters.
A week into the season, Metuchen’s longtime rival, Highland Park, forfeited the remainder of its games, including the annual Thanksgiving Day game against Warnock’s Bulldogs. He noted that Highland Park folded with 19 players on its roster; his team has only a handful more.
“We’re not walking away,” Warnock said. He told his players “we’re not going to do that. Everybody needs to step up and contribute.”
Three days after the forfeit, Vincent Caputo, the superintendent of the Metuchen School District, tried to dismiss the school’s struggle, suggesting the team had been unlucky with injuries.
“I’m not sure it’s a thing,” Caputo said. “It might be just a couple years.”
Others were less sure. Bruce Peragallo, the principal at Metuchen High School, was an assistant coach for the football team in the late 1980s. In those days, he said, the town had a special connection with football, which won a state section title in 1985. Even a few years ago, the football team had 55 members.
Today, the local flag football program is thriving, with about 300 members, while the high school team drops games.
“It never crossed my mind then that we would ever not have enough kids to play a game,” Peragallo said. “But it’s a different time.”
A week earlier, the Bulldogs’ roster had been reduced to 17 active players after three were injured in a game, including one player who was whisked away in an ambulance. That prompted the principal to huddle with his superintendent over the weekend to discuss whether playing another game with such a short roster was a responsible thing to do.
“We talked three or four times,” Caputo said. “He finally called me Sunday and said, ‘I hate to do it, it’s my last choice, but I want to cancel the game.’”
Metuchen’s athletic director, John Cathcart, was so taken aback by the request that he had to look up the forfeiting procedures.
“I didn’t even know how to do it,” Cathcart said. “It just never really occurred to me that this would ever happen to us.”
Warnock signed up four freshmen the next week right from the hallways. He has tried to maintain a sense of humor in his second season as coach.
“I can talk anytime,” he said as he jogged out to a sparsely filled field, “except when I need to play offensive line.”