Why not get rid of football?

Why does Yellow Springs continue to bear the financial burden of putting on such a dangerous and violent sport as football when the team barely draws enough players to have a practice? In fact, in some years they haven't even had the 22 players to put 11 boys on offense and 11 on defense.

Football is the most expensive sport at YSHS. The cost of uniforms, including helmets and pads, insurance, lighting for the Friday night games, officiating, coaching, and maintaining a football field, are out of sight when compared to sports like cross country and soccer. And what is the payback? The games are sparsely attended, the team is lucky to win one or two games a season, and the players are disheartened. Let's face it, the village and the school are too small to support a football program.

Something that has always bugged me about high school football in Ohio is that it is played under the lights. In this time of energy consciousness, why is it that no one has suggested moving the games to Saturday afternoon? Remember Boomer Esiason, the outstanding quarterback of the Cincinnati Bengals a few years back? Boomer didn't play high school football under the lights. And it wasn't just Esiason, it was Jim Brown, Vinnie Testaverde and a host of others. In most of the Northeast, and, in particular, on Long Island where Boomer grew up, football is played on Saturday afternoons. You would have a hard time finding a high school football field with lights.

What is so precious about the Friday night lights in football hotbeds like Ohio and Texas? It's college football. You can't watch the Buckeyes or the Long Horns on TV and attend your local high school game at the same time. But notice this: Ohio State and Texas rarely play under the lights, and then only to accommodate the television networks.

Let's face reality, Yellow Springs is not a football town. We could scrap the program and hire an extra teacher, instead of sending our kids off to local colleges to get instruction in math and science the high school can't afford to offer. With an enrollment that graduates less than 60 kids a year, the high school offers only two foreign languages, Spanish and French. Other schools offer as many as four or five. And a few years ago the school board was considering dropping French.

And I am not even going to get into the risk to our kids of fractures, concussions, paralysis and death.

I have to laugh when I see, on the television news, parents crying about having to pay for their kids to play when their local levy doesn't pass. I love to watch them scramble to get it passed when football is on the chopping block. Art and music programs, school buses, they are all expendable. But football..? Oh, no! Football is sacred.

Right here in Yellow Springs, a few parents showed up at the last school board meeting demanding to know when they were going to hire a new football coach. I couldn't believe it.

“The boys are worried,” one of them said.

And how many would that be, I wondered, a half-dozen?

With a new superintendent of schools and a new athletic director, there is no better time than now to get rid of football. We did it once before. I can't understand why we ever brought it back.