Roster size, inexperience prompt Springfield-Montco to cancel football season

Springfield Township High School canceled the remainder of its varsity football season Monday night, citing a lack of players and concerns about game-readiness of the players still on the roster as its primary reasons.

Athletic director Jason Pane spoke with Montgomery Media Tuesday afternoon to offer details on the process and decision. Pane, who is in his fourth year as the district’s AD, is also an assistant principal at the high school and has seen a decline in roster numbers each year since his arrival.

While the Spartans began offseason workouts with a little more than 30 players, attrition due to varying factors dropped the roster to anywhere between 22 to 18 healthy players on a given day, Pane said.

“We evaluate all of our programs from year to year,” Pane said. “I’ve been here for four years and we’ve watched different data points with all of our sports and specifically with football, we’ve seen some decline in roster numbers for kids who decide to specialize in other sports, for injuries, for kids who transfer. Specifically this year we got into preseason workouts and camps and the number was the lowest it’s been in our four years.”

The Spartans did play last weekend, falling 47-20 at Octorara, but Pane said the outcome of the game had no bearing on the district’s decision to cancel the rest of the season. Instead, it was due to concerns over the makeup of the roster that would be taking the field for the rest of the season.

Pane said within the last 10 days the roster went from 32 players to 28, 26, 22 and at its lowest, dropping to 18 players. He added that number did change from day to day with regard to injured players, but the team has already suffered some long-term injuries that robbed it of players for the whole season.

“The important piece is that it’s not just 18-to-25 (healthy players) that gives us concern, there’s a lot of youth in that group and inexperience and I think with good conscience it would have been hard for me to put some of our youth and inexperience on the field against the level of competition that we play,” Pane said.

Springfield plays as part of the Suburban One League’s American Conference and is by far the smallest school in the entire SOL. Last year, the Spartans went 4-7 overall and 2-5 in the SOL American, the only two wins coming against Norristown and Upper Merion, now both part of the Pioneer Athletic Conference.

Looming games against large schools with experienced rosters like Quakertown, Upper Dublin and Hatboro-Horsham among others gave Pane pause. The decision to forego the rest of the season was not his alone, he actively sought insight from the school’s principal, the district superintendent and the football team’s coaching staff.

“More than half of the roster is freshman and sophomores so of the remaining healthy bodies, the majority of them are younger players,” Pane said. “We have a handful of seniors and don’t have very many juniors at all. By far the largest group is the freshmen so our 14 and 15-year olds are the meat of our roster and I want to preserve their potential and I want to keep them loving the sport and groom this group to bring Friday nights back for us.”

Springfield plans to proceed with a JV schedule using the players remaining on the roster with the entire coaching staff staying intact. There may be some week-to-week cases depending on Springfield or opposing player availability but the plan is to play the full slate of JV games. Pane explained that the varsity staff, under head coach Chris Shelly, was going to have a significant role coaching JV anyway given the limited size of the Spartan coaching staff.

For the team’s seniors, the decision leaves them in a difficult spot. Pane said they will still be welcomed on the roster and his plan is to communicate ahead of time with each week’s JV opponent in regards to getting them on the field.

“As a courtesy to the people we play, I will have a conversation with every school and present them with the make-up of our roster and give them the courtesy of allowing us to play our seniors,” Pane said. “I don’t think that we’ll be putting anybody at risk on the opposite end of this. I don’t have 350-pound linemen that on JV would be unfair or I don’t have a 6-foot-4, 205-pound receiver who’s a senior who would be unfair. But I will ask our opponents if we can play our seniors and that’s if our seniors elect to stay in the program.”

The goal for this fall is to help the young players making up the bulk of the roster to grow, learn the game and learn how to protect themselves on the field and play safely. That also puts the upperclassmen in an awkward spot as they aren’t the program’s future. Pane said he recognizes that and doesn’t want to cost them the football experience they deserve but also can’t look past the reasons why there is no varsity schedule.

Pane said he hasn’t had any conversations yet with any upperclassmen wanting to transfer so they can play varsity football but noted that the decision was less than 24 hours old. Should that situation arise, he said he would have those conversations on a case-by-case basis.

There was no hard deadline to decide the fate of the season, but Pane said he didn’t want to drag things out two or three extra weeks into the season, out of fairness to the opposition and to not put his players at unnecessary risk.

“We needed to do it sooner rather than later,” Pane said. “We could have done it week to week or until we ran out of kids, but how many kids do you have to sacrifice before you get to that point? I’m not willing to do that and we weren’t willing to do that.

“We had a number of conversations, we had several meetings through camp assessing where we were with numbers and assessing where we were with the roster. We listened to everything. (The coaches) are with the kids more than we are. What helps me in this role is I have a background in this sport as a player and a college coach and I’ve been here for four years so I’ve seen the product and our competition.”

Player safety and obligation to protecting that was Pane’s primary driving force but he weighed all factors into the decision. He said if the team’s schedule had been lighter in terms of the type of opponents it was playing, they may have pressed on but felt he still ultimately would have come to the same decision.

Pane will continue to collect feedback and data throughout the JV season and into the offseason. He said potential changes in scheduling is certainly a conversation that will take place in the future, especially if numbers don’t increase or the district feels it isn’t ready to field a varsity product again next season.

Springfield has technically forfeited every game it had left on its schedule, giving its opponent each week a win, which will factor into the District 1 postseason calculations. However, Pane said that any team on the schedule is able to find another opponent for that week and if they are able, the result of that game would replace the forfeit.

“I had that conversation with everybody yesterday, I called our opponents and explained where we were and it will be a topic of conversation at our next league AD meeting to talk in person about it,” Pane said. “Everyone was really understanding, they got it and know that what we did here was for the best interests of our kids and their safety and well-being.”

Regarding the decline in numbers, Pane said there isn’t one specific thing at play. He cited more reporting into the potential dangers of football and athletes choosing to specialize in one sport year-round as factors outside the district and added some of Springfield’s highly rated non-athletic programs have drawn potential athletes away from the field.

That’s another key component to the process. Pane said his goal is for the coaches to now focus heavily on player development and growth with the desire to get back to the varsity level next fall. But if that goal doesn’t seem feasible next year, then this same conversation will take place again.

District officials had a meeting Monday night with the coaches, training staff, players and their families in attendance to break the news and said there was an air of sadness and disappointment from both sides. Pane said the choice “isn’t a great achievement for us” and the district wasn’t happy to make the call, but did what it felt was best for its student-athletes.

“We have an obligation to our families and our students to make decisions that are in their best interests,” Pane said. “That was the baseline of why we moved in this direction, it was really about the quantity of players and the football-readiness of the roster. I want to make sure that’s the message. I understand people are going to ask questions but this decision is what gives us the greatest hope for a strong program, taking this group and developing this young group and growing them is what was in the best interest for the program and the kids who are in the program and the future kids who will enter the program.”