Southampton High School football doesn't have enough varsity players to field a team this season
Southampton High School will not field a football team for the 2025 season. Credit: Gordon M. Grant
Southampton High School will not have a varsity football team this season because it does not have the required number of players to field a team, according to Section XI executive director Tom Combs.
Combs told Newsday that the school's athletic director Darren Phillips notified him through email of the decision on Wednesday morning.
Schools must have a minimum of 16 players to field a team, according to the state Public High School Athletic Association rulebook.
Southampton, which combines with The Ross School in East Hampton, hopes to field a varsity team next season, Combs said. The team went 0-7 last season.
Southampton's enrollment for classification purposes is listed at 359 on the Section XI website. The Ross School's is 87.
The eight games on the Southampton/Ross schedule will be forfeited, as per Section XI rules. The team, which is a member of Suffolk Division IV, was supposed to open the season at Miller Place on Thursday, Sept. 11.
“I’m certainly disappointed,” Miller Place coach Adam St. Nicholas said. “There’s a lot of preparation that goes into football. You look forward to that home opener, and here on Long Island, we only play eight regular-season games. To lose an opponent is upsetting.”
“We’re disappointed for the kids from Southampton, as well as the rest of the Division IV kids who are going to lose a game,” Combs said. “We hope that it doesn’t happen again anywhere else.”
Combs said Phillips told him the school intends to keep a junior varsity football team, but it will not know if it has enough players to compete until later in the week. Any juniors, sophomores and freshmen who were on Southampton/Ross’ varsity team are eligible to play on its JV team, but the seniors are not.
Combs said the seniors will not be able to play for a nearby school this season because the deadline for combining schools has passed.
Neither Phillips nor Southampton superintendent Fatima Morrell responded to multiple requests for comment.
This has happened on the east end before. The shared varsity football team between East Hampton, Bridgehampton and Pierson was unable to compete from 2017 through 2019 because it did not have enough players. Coach Joe McKee, who took over the East Hampton/Bridgehampton/Pierson program in 2015, was able to revive it by promoting the sport externally through a flag football league that he founded.
The league, East Hampton Flag Football, allows kids between kindergarten and sixth grade to play. This helped the town’s kids get into the sport and also familiarize themselves with McKee. Many of those same kids joined East Hampton’s middle school football team after they aged out of the flag football league and stuck with it in high school.
“In those years that we didn’t have a varsity team, our junior high rosters had like 20 to 25 kids on them, which is pretty bad,” McKee said. “After starting the flag football league, we went up to almost 50, 60, 70 kids on the junior high team. Once they got up to high school, that translated into better numbers for us.”
McKee said that the key for Southampton to rebuild itself is by establishing itself with the community’s younger kids.
“I understand that flag is not contact or the real deal, but you’ve got to start with the youth,” McKee said. “That’s where all programs are built and started from. There’s a lot of talent in Southampton. There’s a lot of kids there who are tremendous athletes, and I have full faith that they’ll get that program back up and running again.”
Mike Anderson is a high school sports reporter who has covered 12 sports so far at Newsday. He was the sports editor of Stony Brook University's campus newspaper for two years.
