Auburn High School cancels varsity football season

Conducting a high school football season with just one senior and one junior on a varsity roster would be a daunting challenge.

Too daunting, Auburn High School officials have decided.

For the third time in the last four years, Auburn will not complete a varsity football season. However, unlike 2021 and 2022, when the Eagles halted things halfway through their schedule, this time Auburn will not make it to the opening kickoff.

Auburn has canceled its 2024 varsity season, which was scheduled to begin Aug. 30.

The Montgomery County school’s athletic director, Paul Dominy, said the team made it through “four or five” practices before the decision was made Aug. 6 to not field a varsity squad for the first time since Auburn began play in 1976.

Dominy said Friday that while the varsity roster included 24 players, 22 of them were sophomores and freshmen.

“We just didn’t have juniors and seniors come out,” Dominy said. “The first day of practice we had one senior, one junior, eight sophomores and 14 freshman. We just looked at that, and with the sophomores and freshmen we have, we didn’t feel like we could put them out there without them being in physical danger.”

Auburn plays in Class 1 — the Virginia High School League’s enrollment division that includes the state’s smallest public schools — but it is the 16th largest out of 45 football-playing members in that classification, according to enrollment figures published by the VHSL.

Auburn’s enrollment in grades nine through 12 has ranged between 376 and 409 since 2018 according to the Virginia Department of Education. The VHSL uses enrollment in grades nine through 11 to determine its classifications for upcoming seasons. Auburn had 279 students in those three grades in the March 31, 2022, Average Daily Membership listing by the DOE.

Auburn’s overall athletics program does not lack for success. Since the 2012 season, the school has won an astonishing total of 43 VHSL team championships in 12 sports, 27 by girls’ teams and 16 by boys’ teams, including five boys’ titles in outdoor track and field, three in baseball and two in basketball.

Despite the school’s relatively solid enrollment and the statewide success of its other sports across the board, the football program has flatlined.

Auburn is not alone in struggling to field a team, however.

Cumberland High in Cumberland County also has canceled its 2024 varsity season. Two other VHSL schools — Chincoteague and Rappahannock County — are playing eight-man football. Mathews High in Eastern Virginia, which did not have a team in 2022 or 2023, has just five games on its schedule.

Bland County High did not field a varsity team in 2019 and has not played more than seven games in any of the last three seasons.

Dominy said Auburn held out hope for making the scheduled Aug. 30 season opener against Narrows during the first week of practice.

“We went through four or five days of practice before we made the decision,” Dominy said. “We gave kids a chance to come out. We pursued some of the kids. We just weren’t able to get enough. We wanted to make the decision early enough that our opponents would be more likely to be able find someone to fill our spot on their schedule.”

Dominy said he could not identify a particular reason why Auburn’s football numbers in the junior and senior classes are minimal.

“It hasn’t been a real high number all the way through, but we had a number of them who didn’t return this year who we were expecting.

“They didn’t say why, but if I understand the situation correctly, once one kid said he wasn’t playing, it just kind of snowballed from there.”

The Auburn AD did say the football program has experienced difficulty in convincing athletes from the more successful boys’ sports to put on the helmets and pads in the fall.

“Specialization is one of the things that’s hurting us in football,” he said.

Auburn has posted just six winning seasons in 49 years of football. Three of the winning seasons and the school’s only two VHSL playoff victories occurred during the four-year head coaching tenure of Jack Turner from 2012-15.

The program suffered through a 39-game losing streak from 2009-12.

Auburn posted a 2-4 record during the truncated spring 2021 season caused by COVID-19 under head coach Cam Akers. The 2021 and 2022 seasons under head coach David Seabaugh were cut short in October of each year with an 0-4 record in ’21 and 0-5 in ’22.

The Eagles finished 2-8 under first-year head coach Scott Mikowicz in 2023, defeating Craig County 54-18 and downing Eastern Montgomery 31-16 the following week to start the season 2-1. Auburn found tough sledding once the Mountain Empire District schedule began, losing its last seven games by a combined margin of 346-48.

Dominy said the administration was pleased with the overall 2023 season.

“Scott exceeded expectations last year,” he said.

Auburn’s 10 scheduled opponents in 2024 — Narrows, Craig, Eastern Montgomery, Galax, Giles, Bath County, Fort Chiswell, Grayson County, Eastside and George Wythe — have three options as a result of the school’s decision to cancel the 2024 season: accept a forfeit, find another opponent or play a nine-game schedule.

After the VHSL publishes its first set of the ratings that determine qualification and seeding for its playoffs, opponents of teams that cancel games will have two options: accepting a forfeit or replacing the game.

To date, Giles and Eastern Montgomery have agreed to play each other at Giles on Oct. 4.

Meanwhile, Mikowicz and Auburn’s varsity coaching staff will work with the junior varsity program, which will play its schedule as planned fueled by the freshmen and sophomores. Dominy said the middle school team has 46 players on its roster.

“This has been a bit of hiccup, but we feel really good as we look at everything from 10th grade to sixth grade,” he said. “We feel like we’ve been losing kids the last couple of years because we’ve had to play them on varsity as freshmen. They’ve gotten hurt, they’ve gotten beat up and they haven’t returned.

“We feel like stepping back for a year, gives us the opportunity for the kids to mature and we’ll step right back in next year in a solid spot.”

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