High school sports always a numbers game

Tony Paranto was a student-athlete at Bartlett High in Webster in the mid-1980s and has since gone on to teach, coach and work in administration at his alma mater.

So he’s seen it all scholastically over the course of four decades. Increasingly, though, what the seventh-year athletic director doesn’t see enough of is participation on his high school sports teams.

“It’s not like it used to be,” Paranto said.

But drive 14 miles due north and one gets a 180-degree turnaround.

“Nope, we’re not really hurting for numbers,” Auburn High athletic director Brian Davis said of his alma mater.

The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association experienced a slight increase in overall participation — 1,201 to push the total to 230,127 — at its 377 member high schools in 2018-19, ending a three-year slide.

Conversely, the National Federation of State High School Associations reported a decline in coast-to-coast participation during the same period, ending a 30-year run of growth.

What remains to be seen in Central Massachusetts is what direction the numbers are headed.

“To say they’re up year over year, it’s true,” Gardner athletic director Dan Forte said. “To say it’s the end result that we’re looking for or a drastic, measurable improvement over last year, I don’t think that’s fair to say, either.”

Moving on up ...

Numbers don’t lie, but that doesn’t mean they tell the whole truth.

As the Worcester Public Schools athletic director, Dave Shea oversees seven high schools in New England’s second-largest city.

While official roster numbers won’t be gathered until after the fall season is completed, he said current participation is “consistent” compared to last year. That’s also the case at Sutton High, while numbers are slightly up at Gardner High and robust at Auburn.

But all isn’t necessarily as it seems in Worcester. While most of the varsity teams have full rosters, in many cases it’s because junior varsity players were prematurely promoted to ensure games wouldn’t be cancelled.

“When you schedule, you do everything in your power as an AD to try to fulfill that varsity schedule,” Shea said. “And if that means moving kids up from JV to make sure you have the varsity, I think that’s a commitment ADs make to each other.”

Besides risk having unprepared underclassmen decide to give up a sport after being overwhelmed by the varsity experience, the call-ups depleted JV numbers that were already lower than hoped for, making the foundation for future success tenuous.

Sutton is in a similar situation.

Athletic director Christina Tuomala noted 253 athletes — or one more than last year — are registered for the fall season. That stability was fueled, in part, by the use of middle-school players to fill out the JV girls’ soccer team.

“I had to apply for a waiver (to the MIAA) for seventh-grade girls’ soccer players for the first time in a couple of years,” Tuomala said. “We had no eighth-grade participation at the girls’ soccer level. Zero.”

That’s a stunning statement for those in the know, as Sutton and soccer are synonymous statewide with success.

Three-sport decline

Specialization and economics — either a lack of or an abundance of money — have increasingly become factors, and often intertwined, when it comes to participation.

The number of three-sport athletes has steadily dipped outside the realm of distance running. That impacts participation numbers as an individual is counted separately for each sport he or she plays.

Instead, many athletes have elected to focus on one sport year-round. That’s where money comes in as it can cost, for example, up to $3,500 a year to play club soccer in Massachusetts.

At the other end of the financial spectrum, you have students whose course was charted long before they got to high school. If one isn’t playing hockey, golf or tennis at an early age, they’re highly unlikely to be doing so as teenagers.

“If kids are sort of dabbling in those sports, unless they have a really engaging reason to continue in those sports, they’re oftentimes dropped,” Forte said. “And if the parents don’t have access to be able to provide the time or the energy or the funds to make it work at the youth level, that’s where it becomes really challenging.”

Then there’s football, which is a completely separate issue.

Increased awareness of concussions has contributed to a drop in football participation eight of the past 11 years in Massachusetts. While it remains the most popular sport among boys — outdoor track is second, and first among girls — it’s down 18.2% over that span.

Ten or so years ago, Bartlett fielded freshman, junior varsity and varsity football teams. Two years ago, the Indians went 7-4 and reached the Central Mass. Division 8 final.

This year, they had 13 players initially sign up and dressed 18 for the first scrimmage, late last month. That number has since climbed to 25.

“The concussion thing scares the heck out of everybody right now, especially mothers and fathers,” said Paranto, who noted he has a child that plays football. “My gut feeling is in that the next few years the small schools like us are going to have to co-op with other schools because there just aren’t a lot of people playing right now.”

The good and the bad

Just up the road in Auburn, one finds a plethora of students who are athletes.

The boys’ and girls’ soccer teams made cuts after a combined 110 players tried out. The football roster has seen a slight increase to the mid-50s and numbers are also good for field hockey, cross-country and golf.

Modernized facilities and historic success have contributed to a steady flow of players. So has the community’s staunch support for athletics from an early age.

“Our numbers are good,” Davis said. “A lot of schools don’t have JV teams now, but we do, and some freshman teams as well. I think it starts in the youth programs. We have good, strong numbers in our youth programs and it kind of carries over.”

That’s the road Forte is steering Gardner down as he seeks to bolster overall numbers and shore up some once-proud programs that have fallen on tough times. It wasn’t that long ago the football and hockey teams were winning championships, but over the past two years they’ve gone 0-59.

Forte is in his second full year as AD. He’s also the city’s recreation director.

Pairing the two positions was conceived in a bid to connect programs, both public, like the city ones, and private, like American Youth Football, to the high school and vice versa.

“That was done in an effort to start to find ways to pull together that line between a 5-year-old stepping on a hockey rink for the first time all the way up to their Senior Night on our ice,” Forte said. “Same thing for football. It’s finding ways so there is a nice, healthy channel from AYF or you name it up to the high school level where they recognize our faces because they’re using our fields.

“And in other sports we have city-run organizations. We have city-run basketball programs, and we have expanded those, as well, because we found those are the best ways to create consistency.”

Contact Rich Garven at rgarven@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @RichGarvenTG.