High School Sports Are Booming. So Why Are Some Football Teams Running Out of Players?

More teenagers are playing high school sports than ever, and football participation is rising nationally. So why are some programs still struggling to fill their rosters?

New Petoskey senior Nolan Schley made the move from Cheboygan after the 2026 season was canceled, giving him an opporuntity to take to a high school football field for one final season. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

High school sports have a problem. Too many kids are playing them.

OK, “problem” might be strong.

But that is the strange place we have arrived at while trying to understand why some high school football programs around the country are struggling to find enough players. Because teenagers, contrary to what somebody’s uncle is probably explaining on Facebook right now, have not collectively abandoned athletics for TikTok.

Quite the opposite.

High School Sports Participation Is at All-Time Highs

High school sports participation reached an all-time high during the 2025-26 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. It marked the fifth straight year of growth. And some of the fastest growth is happening in sports that barely existed in the high school landscape a generation ago.

Girls flag football participation jumped nearly 49% in a single year. Girls wrestling continued its rapid rise. Girls volleyball surpassed half a million participants for the first time. Even 11-player football grew, reaching its highest participation total since the 2016-17 school year.

So much for the funeral.

And yet, while football is growing nationally, some individual football programs are discovering that national participation numbers do not play linebacker.

At Northview High School in Johns Creek, Georgia, the program offered an unusually candid assessment of its situation while searching for opponents for its 2026 non-region schedule. Northview competes in Class 5A but said its football program operates more like one from a smaller school because of low participation.

“100% of our team plays both ways QB included,” Northview coach Mario Drayton wrote in a scheduling post on CoachGeorgia.com.

There’s iron-man football, and then there’s looking at the depth chart and realizing the backups are also the starters.

Playing both ways can be a badge of honor when your best receiver also locks down the other team’s best wideout. It means something different when everybody has to do it because everybody is all you’ve got. Northview said part of the reason for seeking comparable opponents was to help build interest and increase participation in the program.

This isn't evidence of a statewide football crisis. The GHSA lists more than 400 schools playing football this season.

But elsewhere, there are examples of what can happen when a small roster becomes unsustainable.

Cheboygan High School in Michigan canceled its 2026 varsity season after injuries left only 13 healthy players. Senior Nolan Schley subsequently transferred to Petoskey, giving him an opportunity to play his final high school season.

When a Small Roster Gets Too Small

Those examples do not mean Georgia is next. They do show how little has to go wrong once a program gets thin, and maybe that is the distinction we have been missing. For years, whenever somebody worried about the future of high school football, the assumption was usually that kids must be quitting sports.

Except they aren’t. They may just be shopping around. The athletic kid walking through a high school hallway once faced a fairly predictable menu: football, basketball, baseball, track, maybe wrestling or soccer depending on the school and community.

Now? That menu looks like the backside of the menu at Waffle House.

Football Has More Competition for Athletes

More sanctioned sports, more club teams, more year-round opportunities, and more legitimate pathways for athletes who once might have been automatically steered toward football. Football didn’t suddenly become Blockbuster. It just got some competition.

Signs also suggest football’s cultural monopoly is softening. Gallup still ranks it as America’s favorite sport to watch, but only one in five adults ages 18 to 34 calls it their favorite — roughly half the rate among adults 55 and older.

Watching and playing are obviously different things. Nobody should draw a straight line from a Gallup poll to a high school depth chart. But both trends point toward the same thing: American sports culture has more options than it used to. A football program doesn't need thousands of teenagers to decide they hate football suddenly. It might only need eight.

Eight seniors graduate. Two athletes specialize in another sport. One transfers. Another gets a job. A couple decides the year-round commitment is more than they want to give. Suddenly, a roster that looked merely small in May looks awfully uncomfortable by September. And those choices do not happen evenly.

Some programs have enough tradition, success, facilities and feeder-system strength to replenish themselves almost automatically. Others have to convince athletes that football deserves a chunk of an increasingly crowded calendar.

That creates a strange kind of football wealth inequality. A program like Buford or Thomas County Central can have three highly recruited players fighting for a starting job while one like Northview needs the starter to play offense, defense and special teams. 

Both can exist inside a state that still considers Friday (and Thursday and Saturday) night football somewhere between recreation and municipal religion. So perhaps the discussion isn’t if kids aren’t interested in football. It is whether football still gets first pick of them.

Football isn’t dying. The hallway just got crowded.