Hampton Bays Cancels Varsity Football Season

For the first time in 47 years, Hampton Bays will not field a varsity football team this fall.

Athletic Director John Foster confirmed the news Friday morning, stating that the decision had ultimately been made due to the low number of upperclassmen interested in playing.

“With the team consisting mostly of freshmen and sophomores, this decision was made based on physical and developmental appropriateness of our athletes with their safety in mind,” he said. “We will use this time and energy in our middle school and year-old youth flag football program to rebuild, so we can re-establish a varsity program in future seasons.”

Varsity head coach Sean Gil referred questions to Foster.

The Baymen were returning five seniors from last season’s 23-player team that finished 0-8 in Division IV. A team must have a minimum of 19 players to field varsity and junior varsity teams. The five returning seniors, though, are not eligible to play on the junior varsity team due to Section XI’s rule regarding player safety.

The decision, made close to the start of fall sports, forced Section XI, the governing body of athletics in Suffolk County, to push back opening day of the Division IV season from September 2 to September 9. The organization had to first figure out how it was going to reconfigure the schedule, and then referees had to be reassigned to those games.

Section XI Executive Director Tom Combs, who said he was notified by Foster of the news last Tuesday, said football Chairman Tim Horan — West Islip’s athletic director — helped come up with several scenarios to present to the Division IV coaches, but the first two were not well-received. The original options were to keep the schedule — which already includes a bye week for the original 11 teams — and add a forfeit where the Hampton Bays matchup was to be, or to play a nine-game schedule where each school competes against each other and then the first week of the playoff qualifier would be the ninth game of the season, and the top four teams coming out of that would enter the playoffs.

The option the coaches ended up going with, which they’d proposed, was to play a seven-game schedule, starting a week later, and use a semi-power-ranked system — which compensates for relief for power points for some teams, considering there isn’t much space between the top and bottom teams in the division.

“It was not ideal timing to find out so late that the Hampton Bays football program did not have enough participants to field a team,” Combs said. “We tried to keep all the homecoming games on the same dates, but some of the opponents obviously had to change. The integrity of the schedule is to play seven games in the power-ranking format and then start the playoffs.”

Section XI Assistant Director Peter Blieberg, Combs said, worked tirelessly to construct a new schedule, and then reassigned officials, because many had matchups scheduled for this upcoming weekend. Section XI had to go back to the drawing board twice before the current schedule was finalized.

“It was very difficult, especially with the extreme shortage of officials in every sport. So, it was a difficult task, but Pete and his crew got it done, and we met with the officials to review it and get their stamp of approval,” Combs said. “We just hope that Hampton Bays is going to work hard at this and recruit kids to play football. Southampton dropped their football program and Greenport did it the year before them, and it hurts everyone involved. But the guys over [in Hampton Bays] said all of the right things, and hopefully they follow through with that.”

Foster did not return requests for comment as to what would happen to those five seniors, or if combining with a neighboring school district was an option, but Combs said the district, along with Southampton, which has not had a varsity program the past two years, have the option to join forces. The issue with that being that when schools combine student-athletes to form one team, that group has to be categorized under the division that would be where the total enrollment of both schools places them. If Hampton Bays were to combine with Southampton, for example, the total enrollment could place that joint team in Division II or III, especially with enrollment in Hampton Bays currently on the rise. The executive director added he was notified, though, that the Baymen will still field a junior varsity team this season.

“They’ve always had that option,” Combs said. “That was discussed last year, but both schools did not want to do it when it came down to it.”