Are you ready for some football? The NFL television season opened last weekend, and the Friday Night Lights have been flipped on at many (but not all) local high school fields. All across America the sights and sounds of these pigskin rituals are marking the changing of seasons from carefree summer to earnest autumn.
But like lots of other parts of our lives these days, the new football season comes at us with controversies, complications and confusions. Football’s TV ratings are declining, and high school participation has dropped by 20,000 players across the country in just the past few years.
Healdsburg High School wasn’t the only school to not field a team this year. The National Federation of State High School Associations reported more than 200 schools have eliminated their football programs, too.
The game and the times are changing. The declining participation is not only about concussions and CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). There is also the politics surrounding the national anthem, too many rule changes, game-delaying penalties and ticket prices.
Baseball might still be America’s pastime, but football is all-American and still the king of pro sports in the USA. The NFL is a $13 billion annual enterprise, where a team franchise like the San Francisco 49ers is valued at $3 billion. Super Bowl Sunday is arguably America’s highest holy day and largest semi-religious congregation.
But when a football-proud community like Healdsburg fails to field a 2018 version of the gridiron Greyhounds, you know something different is happening. This year only 18 boys turned out for the Healdsburg High School team. After two lopsided losses, five players quit, and the remaining players voted 7-4 to disband the team. (A 30-member JV team is playing this year.)
The Healdsburg non-football story made national news in USA Today and The Washington Post, among many other places. The root cause of the loss of a team is the school’s declining student enrollment, now half what it was 12 years ago.
It’s not that surprising that the loss of a football team would make big news where the loss of an advanced biology or chemistry class due to the same declining enrollment would not.
This is still football season, and this newspaper will devote many pages of coverage to other Greyhounds teams and the Cloverdale Eagles, Analy Tigers, Windsor Jaguars and El Molino Lions.
Besides football, we will cover hundreds of youth athletes in soccer, volleyball and cross country. Over the coming weeks of newspapers, there will be few, if any news items about advanced biology or chemistry classes. Go figure.
As Healdsburg High School principal Bill Halliday said, football and team sports are where young people learn valuable lessons about teamwork and self-discipline. Although criticized by some adults, we believe the varsity Greyhound boys made a very adult decision by disbanding their team.
Personal safety was involved, and suspending the program this year will allow for a community-wide soul-searching about what has happened to Healdsburg’s football legacy and its proper place going forward in a changing society.
Today’s football is not the same game that Bronko Nagurski, Crazy Legs Hirsch or the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame once played. The ball is still the same odd shape but almost everything else has changed.
This year that even includes what is a catch and what isn’t. Some of the NFL’s best players are complaining about a new rule that outlaws how they were taught to tackle. Lots of fans are complaining that it’s all un-American.
But, really, what could be more American than Kaepernick/Nike commercials, sideline cheerleaders, beer ad spots every other play break, countless drone camera angles, five-minute-long penalty replays or a U.S. president who wants team owners to fire any player that speaks his own mind?
Heads or tails?
