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Objections to Football:
A Report to the Hopewell Valley Community

by Mary Ellen Curtin

Superintendent Robert Sopko and various members of the Hopewell Valley School Board have asked Hopewell Valley residents opposed to football to step forward and explain their objections. This report is my attempt to explain my opposition to football at Hopewell Central High School in general and to the School Board's acceptance of the HIKE proposal in particular. I am not writing this as part of any organization, club, coalition, or group, solely as a concerned citizen, voter, and parent. I have given sources for all the facts and figures I present in this report, and I encourage all of you to check my work.

Overall:

The School Board has demonstrated a startling inability to do the math. The numbers they themselves give out don't add up or don't mean what they say they mean. It looks very much as though their unanimous decision to go forward with football was not driven or even influenced by the facts.

In summary:

1. We already said "No" by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin in April 2001, in an election where the general school budget and another proposal passed by almost 2-to-1.
   
   • Table 1: Results of April 17, 2001 Election
   
   
2. Right now football is like most other extracurricular athletics in the Valley: paid for by parents, privately. Football (for boys alone) would cost more than boys and girls soccer combined, yet more that 1000 kids in our community play soccer at all levels while no more than a couple of hundred play football. Many of us pay for our children's athletic activities out of our own pockets; HIKE has shown no reason why football parents shouldn't keep doing this, too. Their survey of student interest is meaningless: among other things, it found no students interested in track or in martial arts, activities which attract hundreds of area kids.
• Table 2: Soccer and Football


3. Publicly-funded football makes the sports budget unfair to girls. Right now Hopewell Valley is exceptionally even-handed: we spend $1.16 on boys' sports for every $1.00 we spend on girls. With football, boys would get $1.51 for every $1.00 for girls. This might be legal and just what everyone else is doing, but it is not fair.
   • Table 3: 2001-2002 Sports Budget
   • Table 4: Boys' and Girls' Sports at Hopewell High School
   • Table 5: Effect of Football on Sports Budget
     
   
   
4. Football is an especially dangerous sport. Football has an injury rate 45% higher than the next most dangerous common sport, wrestling; the brain injury rate in football is twice that of the second-place sport.
   • Table 6: Sports Injury Rates
   
   
5. Football is not a sport for lifetime fitness. Just as the academic departments work to prepare our children for lifetime learning, the athletic departments should work toward lifetime fitness, stressing sports participation, not spectatorship.
   
   
6. The school budget is very tight; if we loosen it, it should be for something more directly related to education. First things first: we shouldn't spend a lot of money on a new sport when we have trouble buying adequate books and supplies.
   
   
7. Don't promise kids something you don't think you can deliver. Neither HIKE nor the School Board has presented any hints about how we would pay for football once HIKE's two years of funding are up. We shouldn't yank our children around by starting something we can't afford in the long run. Yes has to mean Yes, and No has to mean No.

In more detail:

1. We already said NO.

When the citizens of Hopewell Valley woke up on April 17, 2001, and discovered that we had given the football referendum the most overwhelming defeat in the School Board's history -- 2848 votes against, more than 67% of the total -- I think all sides were taken completely by surprise. This result is not at all in line with the Valley's voting patterns when spending money is the main issue; when such proposals are defeated, the margins are always much narrower. 'No's to The "Back Timberlane Fields" proposal, for instance, were about 55% of the vote.

Table 1: Results of April 17, 2001 Election

[data from the enormously helpful Hopewell Valley School District Election History page ]

It certainly looks as though about one-third of the voters did what I did: voted Yes to the General Fund and for Proposal #1, and voted No to Proposal #2. This kind of massive shift mid-ballot is very unusual (possibly unprecedented), and I think has to be read as showing voter dissatisfaction not with the School Board or with spending money in general, but with football in particular.

Given the magnitude of this defeat, I just assumed that publicly-funded football was a dead issue, or at the very least that it would not be instituted without going through the referendum process again. I could not believe that the School Board would use its (undoubted) arbitrary power to overlook the strongest expression of negative public sentiment in our history. After all, even in the grim times in 1994 and after, when the Board felt (and I agreed with them) that our need for a new elementary school was becoming desperate, we accepted two bitter defeats at the polls. When we voted in October 2000 and the new school was approved a 2-to-1, we could all breathe a sigh of relief because that level of support is a mandate. Well, last April 17th I thought there was a clear mandate against football.

I am still flabbergasted that the Board is unanimously willing to undermine such a clear expression of the will of the people. What else are we supposed to do but vote? And on what basis do you justify asking us what we think, and then ignoring the loudest No we've ever said? If votes mean anything, then Hopewell Valley has never been opposed to anything the way we're opposed to football.

The defeat of the football referendum was unique for the Valley (and probably the state) because there was no organization behind it. In every case I have ever seen or heard of, a sizable vote (even more a mandate) comes from the backing of an organization -- a party, a coalition, a group -- people who cooperate to write letters, make phone calls, hold meetings, and run ads in support of their issue. We had no "No Football" group in Hopewell Valley, though: we all voted independently, having done little more than talk to a few friends. My family wrote one Letter to the Editor, but it was purely prompted by our own dinner-table discussions; there was no organized or even unorganized group behind it.

Is the School Board more willing to disregard the football referendum because of this lack of organization? Maybe you figure that because people haven't banded together, our dislike of football is superficial. But remember, all of us who grew up in the US have decades of exposure to football, and many have been students in high schools where football was played. (Just for the record, I'm not one of those: I did not grow up in the Valley, but my public high school in Connecticut had no football. I am, however, a third-generation Green Bay Packers fan. My husband's public high school in Georgia had near-religious fervor for football.) Our attitudes to football are going to be of long standing and based on considerable experience. HIKE and their supporters call football in Hopewell Valley "grass roots". Objection to football is bedrock.

What could be wrong with football?

2. Right now football is like most other extracurricular athletics in the Valley: paid for by parents, privately. We have been given no justification for moving football from private to public funding, though it would have a major impact on the school sports budget.

When HIKE and the School Board talk about the athletic opportunities open to Hopewell Valley children, they seem to mean the school sports program only. They have not studied or shown any interest in the many, many activities that we Hopewell Valley parents pay for our children to participate in. The Pop Warner Football Program is just one of those activities, and not the most popular one, either.

The "Survey of Athletic Interest" HIKE performed earlier this month is completely specious. Without getting technical, you have to see the problems when a survey of "intent to play high school sports" in Hopewell Valley detects zero student interest in cross-country or track -- even though this is by far the largest program in the athletic department, with 81 boys' slots, 73 for girls, several state championships, and activity in all three seasons. The 11th-grade gentleman at the Board meeting reported that many students thought they were being asked what they wanted to do in gym class. I have to admire the chutzpah of the four 10th-graders who said, "fishing".

Among sports that aren't played at Hopewell, I also noticed that the "Survey" detects zero student interest in martial arts, yet my doesn't-pretend-to-be-scientific "survey of Hopewell Valley kids I've run into" shows that many (both male and female) are taking martial arts outside school, and that an intramural program would be swamped with applicants.

I'll also point out that one thing the "Survey" does not suggest is that Hopewell Valley girls have any less interest in sports than boys.

Adding football to the Hopewell Valley sports program is not just adding "a" sport, it is adding a sport with a budget twice that of any other. For football to be worth so much to us it should be enormously popular.

When we Hopewell Valley residents think of a sport that is "enormously popular," it's soccer. There are 22 Travel Soccer teams of which half are for girls. The HVSA estimates that travel and recreation soccer together involve about 1100 Valley kids, roughly half girls. For comparison, the school district as a whole had 3641 students in 2000-2001.

According to HIKE, the Pop Warner Football & Cheerleading program in the Hopewell Valley includes 275 boys and girls (I have not seen the breakdown by sex) at various age levels, competing on 6 teams. (This implies that each team has about 45 members, which is as big as the larger High School varsity teams in the area, so I wonder if there are really 275 football players involved.)

Here is how football and soccer would stack up in the school budget:

Table 2: Soccer and Football

In other words, boys-only football would take more money than boys and girls soccer combined. This is patently not proportionate to this area's interest in these two sports.

Many football supporters have pointed out that we have only 72 boys playing in the fall, with a choice of only two different sports. The obvious solution would be to develop a few of the Back Timberlane fields in an economical and restrained fashion (that is to say, not for $2 million) and have a low-stress fall intramural soccer program. Obviously, this could be done for much less money per player than interscholastic soccer costs, and for much, much less than football costs, and would also be open to girls.

I'm sure there are some Valley boys who would be better suited to football than to the sports we currently offer. But we've seen absolutely no evidence that there are so many of them that we should alter the focus of the sports budget for their sake.

Many, many of us find that our children have talents or interests that the current roster of extracurricular activities does not address. Most of us are used to paying for these activities out of our own pockets. Clearly HIKE supporters can and do pay for football for their sons. Why shouldn't they keep doing it, just as the rest of us pay for fencing or ballet or piano lessons or any of the other myriad activities our children pursue outside school? We are not depriving these boys of the chance to play football, we are just saying it's not an appropriate use of our limited school budget.

3. Publicly-funded football makes the sports budget unfair to girls.

Let me make one thing very clear: I'm only talking about publicly-funded football. There is absolutely nothing wrong with parents paying out of their own pockets for their sons to play football, just as there is nothing wrong with us paying out of our pockets for our daughters to dance.

Football is a very expensive sport, and it is 99.9% for boys in the US as a whole. (HIKE has not distributed figures for boys and girls playing Pop Warner football in the Hopewell Valley.)

Although HIKE stresses that many American girls connect with football via cheerleading, they provide neither numbers nor funding for cheerleaders. Since they overlook cheerleaders, I will too.

Here's what the current athletic budget for Hopewell High looks like:

Table 3: 2001-2002 Sports Budget

(I'm really using the numbers of "slots", not students, because I don't know how many athletes play more than one sport. I took the budget figures directly from HIKE's presentation of Monday, May 13, 2002.)

At present, without football, we have a few more boys playing sports than girls, and boys' sports are more expensive on average, so we spend about 16% more on boys' sports overall.

I've put the breakdown by sport in Table 4. Superintendent Sopko has said that he's "quite satisfied" that football's cost per player of $750-900 is only middling-high for this district. But as you can see, the current number of boys' sports costing more than $700/player is 5; the number of girls' sports in that range is 1.

Table 4: Boys' and Girls' Sports at Hopewell High School, sorted by cost/player

Now look at the figures assuming football is played by 75 boys a year at a total cost of $60,000, $800 per player:

Table 5: Effect of Football on Sports Budget

Football would be 14% of the total sports budget, 23% of the boys' budget.

In other words, if we fund football at a quite moderate level we will be spending $1.51 on boys' sports for every $1.00 we spend on girls.

This is why Title IX experts call football an "equilibrium-breaker." Yet the School Board's lawyer, who I assume has done the same calculations I have, says we'll have no trouble under Title IX and I tend to believe him. Why? In layman's terms: because everyone else is doing it.

Mr. Carl Swanson stressed at the May 16th meeting that by not having football, we in the Hopewell Valley are being different, cutting our children off from a widespread part of the American experience. Well, we are different. Without football, Hopewell Valley has been unusually even-handed in funding boys' and girls' sports. Other districts have been sticking to the legal letter of Title IX; we have been sticking to the spirit.

4. Football is an especially dangerous sport.

Every sport has some inherent level of risk, and the risks for football are particularly high. The National Athletic Trainers Association compared injuries of the most popular high school sports (for boys and girls) [you can read their press release or the full study ]
and found that football had the highest rate of injury:

Table 6: Sports Injury Rates (per 1000 games or practices)

Their findings on brain injury were particularly striking, and were published separately in the Journal of the American Medical Association [press release]. Football has the highest concussion rate of the sports they studied by a factor of 2: about 3.7 concussions per 100 players per season, compared to about 1.6 for wrestling.

Various School Board members have stated that they were initially concerned about safety issues, but that they have been reassured; what evidence did they see? They have not shared it with us.

Everyone agrees that we can reduce the football injury rate with scrupulous refereeing and coaching, teaching the athletes proper technique and enforcing its use. But how much reduction can we reasonably expect? I haven't found any hard estimates. It seems to me that a football injury-reduction program would be doing exceedingly well if it cut the concussion rate by 25%, to 2.75 per 100 player-seasons -- which would still be 75% higher than the rate for wrestling.

5. Football is not a sport for lifetime fitness.

Many football supporters at the May 16 meeting emphasized that football involves more than just the players: cheerleaders, marching band, color guard, fans, boosters. They are clearly deeply attached to the spectacle of football, to the way it can seem to unite a school by focusing so much energy on a select group of young men.

I don't think they realized that all this hoopla and excitement is in fact one of the things some of us object to. All this to-do makes football much more than just an athletic activity: it becomes both a performance and a crucial part of the school's social life.

But some of us don't believe that high school sports should be played for the spectators. It makes sports seem at once too important and not important enough. All the social activity around football is a distraction from what should be the mission of the athletic department: to help our kids learn the physical discipline for lifetime fitness, just as the academic departments teach the skills for lifetime learning.

Tackle football is a very poor choice for lifetime fitness. It requires large teams, a very large field, specialized equipment, young males, and has a very high injury rate. What teamwork skills it fosters would be better gained in other team sports, ones that amateurs can play outside of high school or college and for years to come.

6. The school budget is very tight; if we loosen it, it should be for something more directly related to education.

I'm sure I wasn't the only person at the May 16 meeting who was shocked by what the 11-grader and the teacher reported about conditions at the high school. When kids are trying to learn social studies with Cold War textbooks or read the Odyssey from xeroxes because there's no money for books, it seems wildly inappropriate to spend an extra $60,000 a year on a new sport.

I'll get personal for a moment. My family doesn't do football, but we're devoted to fencing. My husband is a competitive fencer, an instructor, and a referee who officiates at many high school games in our area. One of our children fenced for several years; the other is panting to be old enough to start. We would love it if there was fencing at Hopewell Central High, and there's probably enough student interest to have a team.

But there is no way we'd try to get fencing into the school if there isn't enough money for books or other basic educational supplies. First things first. We pay for our sports out of our own pocket, as do the many area families whose children do dance or martial arts or bicycling or rowing or figure skating or horseback riding or gymnastics, or any of the other extracurricular opportunities with which this area is swarming.

Our New Jersey School Report Card shows that Hopewell Regional has exceptionally low per-pupil spending for our area. Despite this, our levels of educational achievement are quite high. We're getting a lot of bang for our educational buck, but we're doing it by pinching every penny until it screams for mercy. Our district motto could be, "More Brains than Money" -- but for that to work we have to have a clear grasp of our priorities and our fiscal reality. Hopewell Valley voters made our priorities quite clear in April 2001 by voting overwhelmingly against football while simultaneously approving the general budget and the technology/security proposal almost 2:1. We want our education dollars to go to education.

7. Don't promise kids something you don't think you can deliver.

HIKE is willing to fund football fully for two years and partially for two more. Why shouldn't we take the money and see how the program works out?

As a parent, I have to say: don't start what you don't think you can finish, and never, ever start out saying "Yes" to your kids when the real answer is "No." If football is going to prove unbudgetable (as I believe it would) when HIKE is no longer funding it, then we shouldn't start it. I certainly do not want to be the one to tell the kids who've gotten used to the idea of football at the High School, "No, you can't have this anymore." It's far, far more honest and considerate of their feelings to let them down upfront, before the program has become entrenched. If you're going to say "No," you have to say it, and stick to it.

Conclusion

Everyone who was at the May 16 meeting will remember what happened immediately after I spoke about a few of the above issues in the Public Comment part of the evening. An irate football supporter rushed up to the podium, turned to look me in the eye, and said, "Who cares?"

Good question. The more I've researched this issue over the few weeks, the more I've come to think that the Hopewell Valley cares: about fairness, democracy, reason, and fiscal prudence. I hope that some members of our School Board will reconsider their positions and start to agree with 2/3 of the Valley's voters. Whether the Board changes its stance or not, I have never been prouder to live here.

Respectfully submitted,

Mary Ellen Curtin
Hopewell Township
writing as a private citizen
May 28, 2002

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