Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Pandemic accelerates the obvious: High school football in Las Vegas lacking participants

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Steve Marcus

Silverado players take to the field for a high school football game against Shadow Ridge at Silverado Friday, Aug. 27, 2021.

There’s this teenager in my neighborhood that many people know, probably because he’s slightly taller than all of the other kids — even though he’s only about 6-foot-2.

Ricky loves football and plays for Del Sol High School, whose program has done a phenomenal job of transforming him into a contributing player on the varsity team.

When I ran into Ricky a few weeks ago, he had some awesome news: Del Sol had won its first game, a six-point victory against Bonanza.

He noticed that I was shrugging off the accomplishment of an early season win and explained further. Not only was that 26-20 victory on Sept. 16 the Dragons’ initial win of the season, it was the first time my friend had won a football game in his life. And he recorded a tackle.

His freshman season in 2020, the first year he attempted to play football, was canceled because of the pandemic. His sophomore season in 2021 only included six games on the junior varsity, as COVID pauses were a reality for many programs and some schools — especially in the Dragons’ class 4A — struggle to field freshman, junior varsity and varsity squads.

The outing against Bonanza was only the 10th game ever in which this high school junior had competed. That’s not unlike the experiences of a lot of high school players, which helps explain why this season of high school football has produced some ugly results across Southern Nevada.

A sample: One school was limited to negative-8 yards last week in a 51-0 defeat; another school crossed midfield just once in its game; nine of the 17 games were played under the mercy rule of a running clock. The mercy rule comes into play when a team leads by 35 or more points. Painfully it is coming into play in the first quarter of some games.

The unfortunate reality is this activity many of us are passionate about is badly hurting and at risk of losing more interest; nobody wants to be on the wrong end of 50-point defeats every week.

And, let’s be honest, a seven-touchdown win isn’t exactly a great night of entertainment for the winning team, some of whose coaches feel such pity for the opposition that they are instructing offensive players to simply gain a few yards and go down to not run up the score.

We are at this deteriorated state because many programs are hurting for participants. This is not only a football issue, as every sport has thin rosters, from golf teams with only a few participants to volleyball programs combining the freshman and junior varsity squads. Simply put, some teenagers stopped playing sports during the pandemic and never returned.

It’s not exclusively an athletic issue as chronic absenteeism, when a child misses 10 or more days in a school year, was nearly 40% during the 2021-22 school year in the Clark County School District.

It’s common to see a football team with fewer than 30 players — or about half of what’s needed to have a fighting chance — running onto the field at the start of the game. Not all of those kids are ready to compete; many lack any lower level experience, some of whom may not be sure where to line up on the field.

Think about it: Some kids have no idea of how to play football and they are being put into action so the game can be played. It’s a testament to teens like Ricky who kept coming back to train, even when there wasn’t a game on the schedule.

While this problem is most prevalent in at-risk neighborhoods — those schools that were already in a pinch with participation and resources and who were hardest hit by the economic and health crises of the pandemic — it’s also affecting high-enrollment schools. One program, a few years removed from the state championship game and located in an affluent part of town, has a varsity team of only 36 players and has lost seven consecutive games.

When you start the season with the bare minimum to compete, one injury — common in football, especially two months into the season — is enough for a roster management nightmare. When you don’t have capable backups, or a lower-level team to grab replacements from, the end result is a game where you are lucky to run a play on the other team’s side of the field.

What we are seeing on Friday nights is the result of years of decline, a process accelerated by the pandemic — but not solely the pandemic’s fault.

When I was in high school in the 1990s, there were about a dozen high schools in the Las Vegas area. There’s now about 40 that have a varsity football team. Even if they could attract the required number of student athletes to properly field a football team, there simply aren’t enough quality coaches to go around.

Forget about a staff of coaches, it’s a struggle finding one coach to lead the program as witnessed by two schools not having a head coach until a few weeks before games began in mid-August. The coaching staffs are so thin that many schools have opted against having coaches in the press box on game day. Having a coach sitting high above the field is commonplace in football at all levels because that’s where there’s a good view of the game.

There’s also a serious equity disparity between the schools that are winning and those who are struggling that will be nearly impossible to remedy.

One school in Las Vegas has so many participants that it has to cut players because it doesn’t have enough equipment to go around. That same school also collects a few hundred dollars from each child at the start of the season to help run the program, everything from practice uniforms to busing into Utah for a game. If a child’s family can’t pay, another of the 200 or so families in the program steps up.

At many of the schools on the lopsided side of these blowouts, parents aren’t coming up with money to support the program because every last penny they have goes toward rent and putting food on the table. They, in fact, can’t find transportation to road games and money for the $7 game ticket.

At these schools, they pick between having a junior varsity or freshmen team, hoping those younger players can develop in only a handful of lower-level games before being thrust onto the big stage of the Friday night lights. Lower level games are constantly canceled because many programs are working with about 70 kids total for three levels, severely hindering the chance of development.

The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association recognized the lack of balance and in 2021 launched the new-look class 4A, where teams struggling to compete were realigned away from the likes of Arbor View, Bishop Gorman, Faith Lutheran and Liberty — schools with an abundance of resources and players.

Click to enlarge photo

Ricky Rafael, a lineman for Del Sol High School, is relatively new to the sport despite being part of the Dragons' program for three years. His freshman season of 2020 was canceled because of the pandemic, and Del Sol only had six games during his junior varsity season of 2021.

The realignment worked in giving Silverado and Shadow Ridge deep playoff runs and spots in the 4A state championship game. But for many of those old-school Las Vegas institutions — my beloved Chaparral Cowboys, the neighboring Valley Vikings or baseball star Kris Bryant’s Bonanza Bengals — it’s not working and a generation of Friday night memories are in jeopardy.

Those memories are what keeps kids coming back. There’s a great photo on social media of Ricky and his mom after a game, him towering over her and a gigantic smile on each of their faces.

That reminds me why high school sports are so awesome in that they give families a chance to create memories that last a lifetime. These athletic teams give kids a greater purpose and sense of school community.

Here’s hoping those leaders in education act quickly to solve the participation dilemma.

Ray Brewer can be reached at 702-990-2662 or [email protected]. Follow Ray on Twitter at twitter.com/raybrewer21