Low enrollment hurting East End football teams
With high school football becoming less and less popular on the East End of Long Island, participation numbers have dropped so low that Greenport and Southampton had to flat out cancel their seasons. Other local area teams are having the same issue. Even Riverhead, a local Division I program and a school that has a massive class enrollment, struggles to fill both a junior varsity and varsity team. It begs the question: Is football on the East End a thing of the past?
Shoreham-Wading River — a team that has always had success on the football field, making the playoffs just about every season and even winning a few championships along the way — is now having trouble filling its roster. When you look up and down Shoreham-Wading River’s varsity football roster, there’s 35 players — a very healthy number. The problem is, however, there is no longer a junior varsity team. There’s 35 players in total within all of the high school.
“We have to practice together now,” SWR head coach Aden Smith said. “We bring everyone on the roster to the varsity games but we have around 13 kids that participate in junior varsity game scrimmages on Mondays. We just don’t have enough to run two full teams.”
Smith has seen a trend of dwindling numbers in his own program. Year after year, fewer kids come out for the football team. Part of the season is that some kids decide to focus on one sport. You rarely see the three-sport athletes anymore. But for others, who knows?
“I don’t know what the reason is personally,” Smith said. “I love football and all these kids love playing football. We have a great program. We send kids to college all the time to play football. It’s just a shift. It’s something we have to deal with, and we’re making the best out of what we have.”
Two sides of the coin were seen in the first two weeks of the Wildcats’ football season. They faced off against Center Moriches in the first week of the season — a team with similar enrollment numbers — and they took care of business handily, coming away with a 60-21 victory. Five different players scored touchdowns. Anthony Mullen scored four on the ground himself. But then this Saturday, they took on Bayport-Blue Point, the reigning Suffolk County champions. The Phantoms have a sideline full of players, a lineup dominated by upperclassmen, and both a varsity and JV team to help with development. The Wildcats couldn’t find the endzone and seemingly stood no chance, losing the game 48-0.
Both teams are in the same division based on school size but because of the athletic enrollment numbers, it makes for very unbalanced matchups. Maybe divisions should be based on athletic participation rather than school size alone.
“I don’t want to make excuses,” Smith said following the loss to Bayport-Blue Point. “We made a lot of mistakes, and we could have been more competitive today. It’s something that we’re going to learn from and get stronger. A game like today shows how much the little things matter. We need to be locked in and know our jobs from the opening whistle.”
Next week, Shoreham-Wading River (1-1) will host another team that struggled with enrollment numbers in the past years. Hampton Bays (0-2) had to take a two-year hiatus from varsity football and only returned back to Section XI play in 2024, posting a 2-7 record last season. The game will be played on Friday, Sept. 26, at 6:30 p.m.
“We need to get back to doing what we do best,” Smith said. “We might be young and we may not have as much experience as the other teams, but we have the athletes to compete with any team. We’ll try to put it all together again for the game against Hampton Bays.”
