Greenport/Southold/Mattituck football drops varsity team because of lack of players
The Greenport/Southold football team charges onto the field for a game against at Greenport High School. Credit: Daniel De Mato
Greenport/Southold/Mattituck does not have enough players to field a varsity football team this season and has become the second school to drop out of Suffolk Division IV this week.
Greenport athletic director Brian Toussaint made the announcement Friday afternoon.
“We held on for so long trying to get enough players,” he said. “We were hoping once school started that we’d get an uptick of students out for football. But we only had ninth-graders join.”
Greenport, Southold and Mattituck have combined to play football for the past 30 years. Toussaint said the plan is to have a junior varsity team this season and a varsity team next season.
“We had just over 20 players for the varsity team,” he said, “but we were having inconsistent attendance for practice. And in good conscience, we couldn’t go varsity with so many ninth- and 10th-graders for safety reasons. We do have enough players . . . to put together a JV and build from there.”
On Wednesday, Southampton High School, which combines with The Ross School, notified Section XI, Suffolk’s governing body of scholastic sports, that it would not be able to compete this season because of a lack of players.
“This has been an ongoing battle with getting sufficient numbers for some teams out east,” Section XI executive director Tom Combs said. “They tried to get as many players as possible and were hoping that when school started, there would be more kids to come out to play football. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.”
Toussaint said varsity coach Tim McArdle will be the coach of the junior varsity.
McArdle, who attended Suffolk Media Day at the Radisson Hotel in Hauppauge on Aug. 26, said at the time that the team was short of players but that he was optimistic that the roster would grow.
“I’ve been duct-taping and gluing this thing together for years and it’s finally come to a head,” he said. “Our numbers have been in decline the past five years.”
Key players such as seniors Doug Corazzini, John Tunc and Joel Mejia are not eligible to play this season because of transfer rules. After Southampton revealed earlier this week that it could not field a varsity team, Combs said seniors will not be able to play for a nearby school because the deadline for combining schools has passed.
“I feel terrible for my seniors,” McArdle said. “It was very hard to tell them we weren’t going to be able to field a team. We are going to ask all seven of them to stay with the program in a different capacity helping out with the JV.”
With the departure of the Southampton and Greenport/ Southold/Mattituck football teams, Combs said it was necessary to rework the entire regular-season schedule.
“We’ll redo the schedule and take into consideration things like Homecoming Day, which has been planned for months at all schools,” Combs said. “There are 10 teams left in the division, and we’ll put together a nine-game regular-season schedule with the top four teams qualifying for the playoffs.”
Had the sectional office decided to leave the schedule as is, some high schools would have played only six games this fall.
“All that hard work in the offseason to play a six-game schedule is just not fair to all of the other member schools,” Combs said. “The nine-game schedule allows every team to play each other with no power rankings.”
Gregg Sarra is Newsday's high school sports editor and has been on the beat since the mid-1980s.
