Southampton cancels varsity football season; not enough players

Southampton High School will not field a varsity football team this fall because it fell short of having the minimum number of players required to compete.

The Southampton school district confirmed the cancellation of the season to Greater Long Island, but did not elaborate.

Section XI executive director Tom Combs told Newsday that Southampton athletic director Darren Phillips on Wednesday notified him by email of the decision. Under New York State Public High School Athletic Association rules, a school must have at least 16 players to field an 11-player team.

Southampton does not run its program alone. The school has shared a team with The Ross School in East Hampton, as part of an arrangement that allows smaller schools to pool athletes in order to compete.

But even with both schools drawing from their student bodies — Southampton is listed at 359 students for athletic classification purposes and Ross at 87 — the combined roster still fell short of the 16-player threshold.

Section XI, which governs high school athletics in Suffolk County, confirmed that the eight games on the Southampton/Ross schedule will be recorded as forfeits. The team, a member of Suffolk’s Division IV, was scheduled to open at Miller Place on Thursday, Sept. 11.

Combs said the district plans to keep a junior varsity program but will not know for several days whether it has enough players to compete. Younger players may move down from varsity to JV, but seniors cannot play for other high school teams because the deadline for forming combined teams has passed.

Locally, the difficulty getting players is not unique to Southampton. The Greenport/Southold/Mattituck “Porters” squad has seen a very light turnout in preseason workouts, with head coach Tim McArdle noting that the program is “on life support” as it scrambles to attract players in the run-up to its Sept. 12 opener, according to The Suffolk Times.

“I’m confident that tackle football at a young age does more harm than good,” Frascogna, a proponent of flag football for pre-teens, told Greater Long Island. “Parents are hesitant to sign kids up for tackle in the first place because of injuries. With options to participate in other sports, most played year-round, it’s easier for kids to find another passion.”

He noted that youth programs tend to pigeonhole players too early, with big-bodied 9-year-olds placed on the line who later grow into leaner athletes.

“Youth coaches in search of championships don’t often focus on long-term development,” he said. “The hot August practices in heavy equipment, dads yelling at kids to hit friends — the true football kids will be there. But the athletes who are just trying a sport grow weary quick.”

Frascogna recalled asking middle schoolers with the right build why they didn’t play football: “A lot of times they said they tried already and didn’t like it — for those very reasons.”

It’s a slight dip from the previous year’s 1,031,508, but it continued to mark a strong rebound from 2021-22, when participation dropper below one million — to 973,792. At the time, it was the lowest point in more than a decade.

In New York, 25,874 boys played 11-player football last year. It was a 4 percent drop from 26,882 the prior year and an 11 percent decrease from 28,656 in 2022-23.

---

_{Top photo: Southampton football players are introduced for a home game in 2024 (Southampton UFSD/Facebook).}