It takes a lot of guys to make up a football team. Look at the sidelines at a UW Badgers home game some weekend; NCAA teams are allowed to have 105 young men in uniform for home games. It takes a lot of money to outfit a football team.
I read an article recently that said the University of Nebraska, for example, spends on average over $1,000 to equip each player. At that rate, it would take more than $105,000 to outfit their team for a home game! And then there’s the cost of the coaches’ salaries and traveling expenses.
At Wisconsin, head coach Gary Anderson gets nearly $200,000, and nine assistants get an additional $2,500,000. So, in addition to the $1,000 for equipment, it costs an average of nearly $26,000 per player for their coaching!
High schools don’t spend that much for coaching, and they probably don’t spend as much per player for equipment as college programs do, but it can’t be a big difference. The most expensive pieces of equipment are the helmet and shoulder pads. Helmets can cost up to $350, including chinstraps, facemask and decals. Shoulder pads can also cost $350, depending on the position the player plays.
In addition to helmets and shoulder pads, schools are required to provide players with a mouth piece, hip pads, thigh pads, knee pads, a tail pad, belt, pants and jerseys. Kids generally pay for their own cleats, gloves, athletic supporters and base layer sportswear such as Under Armour. Certain players, like quarterbacks or running backs, might also require additional items like rib pads or back plates.
Lots of players also wear a “girdle,” pants worn underneath the uniform with thigh and hip pads glued onto the fabric. I suppose that beats stuffing a lot of pads into pockets in your pants like we did in high school. Many players also wear an undershirt, which has rib and elbow pads and padding on the shoulders on which shoulder pads rest.
Helmets have come a long way. At the end of the 19th century, players weren’t even required to wear protective head gear during games. The first football helmets were made of leather and didn’t protect the face. During the 1940s and ’50s, companies began using plastic for the outer shell. When I was in high school, I played just my freshman year because I was the littlest kid in high school. We had plastic helmets but no facemasks.
During our junior year, a single bar was attached to the helmets. Eventually, steel grilles and suspension systems, even inflatable air pockets designed to keep the helmet positioned on the crown of the head, were introduced.
So with all the publicity about concussions in the sport and the escalating costs of helmets, is it any wonder that fewer and fewer parents are letting their sons play football? And is it any wonder that schools struggle to keep their traditional football programs afloat?
The school where I taught for 24 years is a small school and has a limited number of males available for fall sports. With soccer and cross-country teams to draw some of the athletes and with all the concern for player safety, it’s difficult to field a big football team. So, a couple of years ago, Wayland opted to play eight-man football. I read recently that even some larger schools, like Nicolet in Milwaukee, have dropped the sport altogether because of a lack of players.
Surprisingly, there are quite a few other schools in Wisconsin who have also made the switch to eight-man football. On the WIAA website, I counted 23 teams in 2013, up from 16 the year before. The WIAA introduced an eight-team “jamboree,” with the top four teams from the north playing the top four from the south. If the number of programs increases to 32, the WIAA might consider a post-season playoff.
While it is just as expensive to outfit a player on an eight-man team, the overall cost to school is considerably less, and because the game is faster and less concentrated on smash-mouth football, this may be a trend for the future of the sport in high schools.
Special note to Times Herald readers: A very fine article by Tom Beschta, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, appeared in this newspaper last September. The Lena High School graduate spent much of the last weeks of his summer internship developing a story covering eight-man football.
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