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About Appeal tribune. (Silverton, Or.) 1999-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 17, 2018)
Appeal Tribune ܂ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2018܂ 1B Sports Oregon high school football appears on dramatic decline Pete Martini and Gary Horowitz Salem Statesman Journal USA TODAY NETWORK Kyle Greeley was a star basketball player for West Salem High School. At 6- foot-4, Greeley showed great court awareness and athleticism, and an abil- ity to take over a game for the Titans. It’s easy to envision how his athletic attributes could have been applied on the football field as a quarterback, see- ing over defensive linemen and finding open receivers, and if plays broke down, being able to adjust on the fly. Greeley played Pop Warner for a few years and contemplated playing football in high school. But by the age of 15, Gree- ley already had his mind made up: “I definitely knew basketball is what I wanted to pursue in my (sports) career.” Greeley is one of thousands of ath- letes in Oregon high schools who have walked away from football in recent years. At its peak in the 2008-09 school year, there were 15,009 Oregon high school students participating in foot- ball. That number dropped to 12,473 in 2017-18, a decline of 17 percent. At the same time, high school stu- dents playing sports other than football climbed from 82,147 to 87,434, an in- crease of more than 6 percent. Coaches, parents and football offi- cials say there are many reasons for the decline: a wider variety of organized sports for kids to play; the growth of athletes specializing in one sport; the cost of outfitting, training and caring for players. And perhaps more than others, the increasing worry about concussions. Football has long been the marquee high school sport in Oregon, but it’s dropped to the third-most popular sport among all athletes, in terms of partici- pation numbers, trailing basketball and track and field. And it may soon drop behind soccer. Football remains the most popular sport among boys, but for how long? Fans and supporters of the sport are trying several things to regenerate inter- est. New methods of tackling and stricter protocols for players who receive con- cussions are designed to make the game safer. And leagues are being reorganized more frequently so teams that have been faring poorly can be placed with teams closer to their competitive level. Why football participation is declining One of the main reasons for the sig- nificant drop in football participation is the concern over injuries, especially head injuries. In recent years, there has been an emphasis on preventing and treating concussions at all levels of football, whether it be the protocol for treatment Central football practices for their game against North Salem on Tuesday at Central High School. MICHAELA ROMÁN / STATESMAN JOURNAL or the way tackling is taught. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a degenerative disease in the brain caused by repeated head trauma, and recent studies have found it to be common among football players. In January, Washington State quar- terback Tyler Hilinski took his own life, and he was found to have suffered from CTE. Hilinski’s death was a wakeup call for West Salem senior quarterback/defen- sive back Simon Thompson, who has multiple college football offers. “The young man at Washington State, very tragic, very young. It scares people, it scares parents,” Thompson said. “After I read the article about (Hilin- ski), I definitely talked to my mom about it, and we had a conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing to talk about and realize it’s there. I feel like if I play with worries, then I’m going to play soft. I just have to play aggressive.” Thompson stuck with football, but so many other athletes have not. There were about 2,500 fewer high school football players in the state of Oregon in 2017 than in 2008. Former South Salem baseball stand- out Aaron Zavala played football grow- ing up in Keizer, but with injury con- cerns, he decided not to pursue it in high school. “I considered playing (football) later on in my high school career,” said Zava- la, who received a preferred walk-on of- fer from Oregon and is a freshman catcher for the Ducks. “But the injury thing was part of it be- cause I knew I would be able to play (col- lege baseball) somewhere, and risking injury and having that opportunity go away wasn’t something that was worth it to me.” as well,” Cantu III said. “My main thing was making wrestling a little more of a priority and putting all my time and ef- fort into getting better.” Specialization It’s a tough decision for families, whether to specialize or not. Athletes who specialize often compete on off- season club or traveling teams for their chosen sport. Gragg said there are a number of benefits to playing multiple sports, even if you are pursuing a college career in a primary sport. “It’s good to stretch an athlete that might not be very good at golf to actually maybe play golf, because it’s going to stretch you and make you better in your primary sport,” Gragg said. “When I have the opportunity to share those things, I talk about the importance of playing multiple sports. Sprague football coach Jay Minyard said the idea that high school athletes must specialize in one sport in order to get a big-time college scholarship is a myth. “Parents get sucked into the special- ization thing at a young age because there’s all these different agencies out there,’ Minyard said. “Some of the big- time college football coaches will tell you that they look for multiple-sport athletes.” Bill Swancutt, who was an all-state player in football and basketball for Another major factor for football’s declining participation is sport special- ization. Competition for scholarship offers, particularly at the NCAA Division I level, is fierce and there is much more national attention given to the recruiting process than there was 10-20 years ago. So more athletes focus solely on their best sport year-round, rather than com- peting in multiple sports for their high school. “Even at our high school, there are. three or four kids that don’t play foot- ball, maybe more than that, and I’m beg- ging them to come out,” Central football coach Shane Hedrick said. “But their summer program in baseball takes them through fall ball, and then maybe bas- ketball picks up, and it just doesn’t hap- pen.” Sprague junior Santos Cantu III, a two-time state wrestling champion, started playing football in fourth grade and stayed with it through his freshman year with the Olympians. Then Santos opted to specialize in one sport. “I felt like wrestling was what I want- ed to do in the future and go to college and wrestle, and hopefully after college A guide to snail mail after age 50 Fishing Henry Miller Guest columnist A friend who is late in the first decade of his post-college career was musing about his snail mail, such as the inter- mittent and thin stream has become in the internet age. He described it as mostly stuff such as wedding invitations and birth an- nouncements, along with the rising tsu- nami of political mailings that will ebb like a flushing toilet on Nov. 7. Wanna trade? When you reach a point on the arc of the actuarial table – identified, trust me, as the day that you get a 50th “birthday” card inviting you to join AARP - most of the stuff that comes into the mailbox fits one of the three Bs: Burn you, bury you and buy you out. Meaning that several times a week you can count on offers for pre-paid cre- mation, pre-paid eternal dirt-nap plot packages and offers from people who “saw your house when I was in the neighborhood and would really like to talk to you about selling it.” The merchants of death mostly print their offerings on heavy card stock usu- ally reserved for the aforementioned wedding and birth announcements. In this case, the only invitations in- volved hint that the urn or the grave looms, and you don’t want to leave your distraught survivors in a lurch about the expenses of dealing with your earthly residue. My dad was so taken by the generous offers that he signed up for three sepa- rate mail-order and door-to-door sales pitches for cremation plans, apparently forgetting about previous purchases. That was discovered upon cleaning out a file cabinet in his apartment when he moved into assisted living. I digress. The third type of mailings is almost always in some font such as Lucinda Handwriting or Segoe Script to suggest that the author, the ethereal Sylvia, Sam or Tom, really, really cared enough to hand-write the message. After all, what homeowner wants to get a letter in a legalese font such as Ga- ramond from the Ginormous Real Estate Investment Trust about a potential sale of your quaint cottage into the insatia- ble maw of the booming rental market? At this point, you’re probably asking what does this have to do with the out- doors? If I can be allowed a curmudgeonly observation, I miss mail. In ancient times, around 10 b.c. (be- fore computers), there were these things called mail-order catalogs. And the best among those for out- door enthusiasts, “the authentic world source for hunters, fishermen, guides … forest rangers, commercial fishermen, trappers and explorers” was Herter’s, Inc. of Waseca, Minn., a fount of, ahem, unverified superlatives. You can find “collector’s editions” of the catalogs online, which is where I stumbled across several and rediscov- ered the magic. As a pubescent aspiring forest rang- er/trapper/explorer/gunsmith with an overactive imagination, the 100-plus- page catalog was the stuff that dreams were made of with multiple mysteries, secrets and potential adventures on ev- ery page. All from the “world’s largest makers,” also of dubious authenticity, of every- thing from fishing hooks, survival and camping equipment, durable fiberglass boats and decoys (it says so right on the cover). The bombastic hyperventilations Benefits to playing multiple sports See FOOTBALL, Page 2B throughout the Herter’s catalog make J. Peterman’s impossibly intrepid de- scription of his P-44 Monkey Pants sound positively anemic. The Herter’s catalog proved to be tru- ly educational. What other publication extols the virtues of and explains the functions of something called a Herter’s Hudson Bay Husky Power Snow Sled (snowmobile), or explains what a “ventilated rib” is (think shotguns), both produced, of course “by the world’s largest maker?” As a kid thumbing through the cata- logs and dreaming about outdoor ad- ventures, it reminds me about the joke about the kid who said that he liked to read the dictionary “because all of the other books are in there.” Item 2, fish defamation: Good friend and outdoor buddy Phil McCorkle text- ed to say that he was, in fact, fly fishing in Yellowstone despite coming down with a raging head cold just prior to de- parture. “There are people dropping like flies with this thing,” he writes. “I am in West Yellowstone now, but I feel like carp.” Been there, done that … the typo I mean. Henry Miller is a retired Statesman Journal outdoor columnist and outdoor writer. You can contact him via email at HenryMillerSJ@gmail.com
