From one to five, “How important is football TO YOU to have at SPA?”

Students, alumni, and parents answered this and many other questions about the football team at St. Paul Academy and Summit School on a survey sent by the Football Task Force.

With a current team so small that its last game this season was forfeited due to an insufficient number of uninjured players, the SPA football program is faced with the question of how to keep players in the game.

The Football Task Force was formed to address the urgent lack of participation in the football program by Head of School Bryn Roberts in the fall of 2014, and is headed by Director of Athletics, Peter Sawkins.

“The objective is to figure out what makes sense for football at SPA,” Sawkins said. “It’s everything from ‘do we continue to have it? or not have it?’ and if we do, what is the right mix and where can we work in the right balance to have a successful program?”

Perhaps the football team’s decline and eventual insufficiency was evident in the assembly announcements in which players would call upon their classmates to join the football team, insisting that it was not too late to help out a team that was just hanging on by a thread. Students would murmur, expressing pity or indifference, and in the end, no one joined the team.

But, when “[the team] ended last year by forfeiting because we ran out of players, it was clear we couldn’t continue [with] business as usual,” Sawkins said.

“We had decided even before we elected to forfeit the playoff game…that maybe we needed to put together a task force…to consider how to proceed with football at SPA,” Head of School Bryn Roberts said.

In some cases, the lack of boys playing football could easily be attributed to a prominent soccer culture at SPA. “[Football]w just competes so much with soccer,” junior Christine Lam said, referring to boys that also played club soccer.

Sophomore Emre Kihtir agrees: “Football wasn’t really a huge [attraction] to me—I played soccer already.”

Still, the football team is extremely integrated into SPA traditions including Homecoming and (Beat) Blake Day.“We’ve been playing football for about 114 years at school, so its deeply rooted in our past. Any sport you play that long has a significant role in the culture and understanding of athletics at school,” Roberts said.

This year, the Varsity Football Team’s record was 0-8, arguably a deterrent for prospective football players. “You have people who don’t want to play because they think it’s not as fun because you’re not having as much success on the field and then the numbers [of players] dwindle and it becomes sort of a negative spiral,” Sawkins said.

“People are discouraged. [The football team’s] history of losing doesn’t look so appealing,” freshman Arib Rahman said.

Sophomore Muniel Rizvi noted that, “if SPA doesn’t already have a better football team, then why would [someone who likes football] want to join the team?”

Rahman also cited fear of injury and lack of knowledge as other forms of dissuasion. “Having people from the team telling others what it’s actually like [might help increase participation]. I don’t know a lot of what they do,” he said.

The Football Task Force has looked into moving the football program to another school, similar to the cooperative teams in Girls’ Lacrosse and Girls’ Hockey. “We have a list of schools that may be opportune…[but] when we’re asking to join another program, the decision falls out of our control,” Sawkins said.

While the future of the football program is unclear, the chances of losing it entirely are very low. “First and foremost, as the head of the Task Force, I’m thinking about what [we can do] to support the program, keep the program going, and give our football-playing athletes an option to play,” Sawkins said.