SALT LAKE CITY — In the hottest part of the summer, go to any high school football field and the smell of chasing dreams swirls with the sound of overcoming challenges.
Ask those teenage players what their goals are, and for nearly all of them, somewhere on their lists is winning a region title, making the playoffs or winning a state championship.
They talk about how hard they’ve worked, and what it might mean to them and their school community to earn something significant, sometimes something the program has never won.
So if title hopes are an integral part of most programs, why would any team forfeit the opportunity to win a title before the season even begins?
For several Utah high schools either considering or committed to playing independent football next year — which excludes them from postseason play and awards — it’s an acknowledgement that high school programs are about more than titles.
And for at least two high schools — Judge Memorial and Cottonwood — it’s about reviving programs that have become unsafe and unsustainable.
“Ultimately, we’re trying to save what was once a proud program,” said Judge athletic director Scott Platz, who led the effort of the private 3A school to go independent in football next season. “This year we had 17 freshman, by far our largest group of incoming freshman in six years. If we want to keep the momentum going, we couldn’t put them out there against seniors, physically mature men with lots of varsity experience. Frankly, they were going to get hurt.”
The tipping point for Judge Memorial came when it was scheduled to host eventual 3A champion Morgan High in Salt Lake City on Sept. 27.
“They had 37 seniors on their team,” Platz said. “We didn’t have 37 people on our team, let alone seniors. ... It was not an easy decision, but we had to do what we felt was best for our players’ safety.”
So they paid a fine and forfeited the game.
Two games later, Platz was sitting in the stands at a game against 2A charter school Summit Academy when parents began asking him about the possibility of playing 2A football.
“I knew that wasn’t an option,” Platz said. “But I started thinking, ‘What about going independent?’”
A month later, the idea gained support, and in November the school asked the executive committee of the Utah High School Activities Association if it could go independent for a year. That group said no, but Judge administrators appealed to the board of trustees and were given permission to play independently next season (2020).
Judge Memorial Catholic High School isn’t the first or only urban school to choose this path as a way to revitalize a program. Ogden High did it in 2015 and 2016, and Cottonwood High will make its pitch to go independent for at least a year on Wednesday. Payson submitted a letter on Friday asking to be considered for independence, although administrators held a meeting Monday night and said that if parents and students don’t want to pursue it, they won’t.
Rural 1A schools Whitehorse and Monument Valley are members of the Utah High School Activities Association, but they play independently in football, in part, so they can play schools that are closer geographically and more like them socioeconomically.
Brenan Jackson, the associate director of the Utah High School Activities Association who oversees football, said the move to a statewide ranking system and all-comers state tournament in team sports is an effort to address some of the issues schools have with region and class alignment. Still, he knows there are unique and difficult situations and football is a sport where the number of participants is critical to success.
“We know there are a number of teams struggling,” Jackson said. “And right now, the majority of issues are with football. ... I think (independence) was a good thing for Ogden.”
Ogden pioneered the idea for urban schools in the 2015 and 2016 seasons, for many of the same reasons other schools are now contemplating it.
“We were moving up to 4A during a new alignment, and our proposal to the UHSAA was that we could play 3AA football and 4A in everything else,” said Ogden athletic director Shawn MacQueen. “At the time, it seemed like it was one of those proposals that was something new, something that hadn’t been done before, and they felt like it wouldn’t fit with what they wanted to do.”
Now football programs are aligned separately, and a number of schools play in different football classifications than their other sports for myriad reasons. But back then, it was unheard of in Utah.
“That generated this energy swell that came from the idea, and it came from our community, our board and the district administration,” MacQueen said. “It really came from the idea that we asked to play down one classification in football because we felt like the number of participants would have made it really difficult to compete.”
At the time, Ogden struggled to maintain a junior varsity program.
By the time Ogden’s two-year experiment with independence ended, the state was aligning schools separately for football, and had created six classifications.
“That put us right where we wanted to be,” MacQueen said. “The timing could not have been better.”
So did it succeed in rebuilding the program?
“I think looking back on it, it didn’t give us a huge influx of numbers,” he said. “Maybe if we’d had the opportunity to continue to develop, but it was, in all honesty, really difficult to schedule opponents as an independent program.”
He said the school could easily fill its preseason with teams that matched them in size and ability, but when other teams began region play, Ogden was left scrambling to find teams with a bye — and that meant taking whoever was available, rather than the kind of teams it hoped to play against 10 times a season.
“We had three seasons in a row of winless football,” MacQueen said. “And things have changed. We went to the playoffs last year with a winning record, the first one in several years. It was fun to be part of the RPI system this year (which includes all teams in the state), and have a playoff game with Logan. Those things have added some excitement to the program.”
And all of the administrators acknowledge that there is a special kind of energy and excitement generated by a school’s football team.
Greg Southwick, Cottonwood High’s athletic director, said the 5A school began discussing the advantages and disadvantages of going independent for football shortly after the season ended.
“There were times this season when we only dressed 20 kids for varsity — and most of those were sophomore and freshman,” Southwick said. “And many of those had already played a JV game earlier that week. So our kids were really at risk for the amount of time they were spending on the field playing two games a week.”
The distress of a program can be measured in several ways, but most common are the number of participants and numbers of wins and losses.
Cottonwood has had two wins in the last four seasons. That’s a long way from 2010 and 2011 when it played in the quarterfinals and 2008 when it played for a state championship.
Cottonwood’s collapse coincides with a rule change by the Granite District that barred big-money donors from volunteering as coaches. That led to then-offensive coordinator and benefactor Scott Cate leaving the program and taking much of the equipment and technology he paid for with him.
As the program struggled to rebuild physically, the team cycled through a number of head coaches and lost incoming players to nearby schools like Olympus, Skyline and Brighton.
“Kids who played in Cottonwood Little League were opting to play for more successful programs under open enrollment,” Southwick said.
Open enrollment benefited Cottonwood when its program was winning, but it’s meant an exodus of talent now that the program is struggling.
Southwick said Cottonwood has a plan to rebuild during independence that will allow it to increase numbers and let young players gain physical maturity, experience and more on-field success than they’d have if they competed against 5A teams week in and week out.
“I think the state is supportive of this because this is the best route to rebuild,” he said. “Rather than, you’ll see some school just dissolve football teams.”
Payson athletic director didn’t return phone calls, and the principal referred the Deseret News to Nebo School District spokeswoman Lana Hiskey, who replied with only this email: “Payson High has had some questions about going independent in football only. PHS still has questions at this point and what this would entail.”
She didn’t respond to additional questions about why Payson High might pursue this option or what it hopes to gain from football independence, but at the meeting administrators said that like the other schools, they hope independence will allow the school to be more competitive and that success will help it replenish numbers.
Payson’s head coach recently resigned, and school officials will be making this decision before hiring a new coach. Parents were told that next year’s ninth graders are going to play in a ninth grade league, which they believe will help them retain what has been a successful eighth grade group of athletes.
They also said they hope the association will change the way it forms regions and classifications, giving more weight to success and socioeconomic factors, rather than just using enrollment numbers, according to one of the parents.
Those administrators considering independent football understand why some see it as surrendering or the first signs of killing the sport at a school. But they insist they’re doing this because they’re determined to keep football at their schools.
“Frankly, after a couple of discussions with people from other schools who are either pursuing it or considering it, the opposite is true,” Platz said. “We’re trying to save our football programs. I think we need to embrace this independence movement, especially for teams like ours, because what we’re doing is trying to save football. We’re trying to survive and hopefully be able to build it back up.”
So does this effort say anything about the viability of football? That depends on who you ask.
For those who see this the way Platz and Judge officials see it, this is an acknowledgement that if schools want to continue having vibrant, successful football programs, they may have to rethink the foundations on which they are built.
Platz said he attended a conference where participants discussed some of the issues causing participation numbers to drop in the sport.
“They said football is the only sport where there is no maturation within the sport,” he said. “When you start, you start with 11-on-11 in pads. What they’re suggesting is flag football in elementary school, and in the middle school age, a 7-on-7 rookie league that’s tackle (on a smaller field). ... I like it a lot, but who is going to be the courageous one who is going to start it?”
But does the fact that three larger urban schools are struggling with participation numbers and seek independence as a way to rebuild programs says something about the future of the sport?
For those involved in this effort, it says schools are trying to get creative to save a sport they value.
While there are myriad reasons why schools struggle with success, or have declining participation numbers, football offers an even more complicated puzzle. The sport has endured intense criticism and scrutiny because of the uniquely violent nature of the game.
For critics of independence, it is an indication that some schools will eventually struggle to field any kind of football team, let alone a competitive one. But this option to people like Platz is a way to rethink how a community builds and supports a football program, which can be uniquely unifying for a school and community.
“I think it absolutely says something about the viability of football,” Platz said. “I’m very grateful the state was willing to let us try this and allow us to try and save football, to keep it viable. Right now the trends are against football. (Some people) don’t want their kids playing football, somewhat because of head trauma, but there are a lot of other injuries kids can sustain, and there are a lot of other (sports) options. This shows others there is a path where this can actually work and the sport is still viable with the right tweaks.”
He said “taking a step back” and allowing the players to develop and physically mature not only ensures they’ll have more success against other teams, but also they’ll have better experiences individually.
“Some have said they don’t want to do this because it will open a floodgate,” he said. “This is a floodgate we need running. This is a floodgate that supports football, and we want that.”