A point was made in particular about the schools Riverheads play during the regular season. While it is true they play “up” for most of their regular season, this discussion has more to do with roster size and the recent dominance during the playoffs of certain teams not just the Gladiators.
But as a point of reference, JV played last night and had 30 8th and 9th graders with no 10th graders. So combined that’s 82 young men in five classes playing football (52 I think on the Varsity). That kind of participation is extremely rare up to and including most C3 schools. Another oddity is that two years ago this same JV group only had 18 kids playing Seniors (Middle school) and were getting smashed most weeks.
All that said, limiting the size of the rosters in C1 or moving teams based on their participation sounds like it levels the field but in the end will still drive less successful teams to lower numbers. Twenty years ago Stonewall Jackson was a beast but have been struggling for about a decade now. They cancelled their season for lack of numbers and they are 2A. There isn’t a formula that fixes this but there should be some kind of discussion that leads the VHSL to developing a plan to begin to address it.
