The night before one of the biggest games of the season, Doug Hogue had gathered his team in the cafeteria of Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, N.Y. He told them to remember where to line up before each snap, to play with passion and avoid mistakes — the usual coach talk.
He also reminded them about the unusual compromise they had made to keep their program alive. Before the season started, Yonkers merged its two remaining high school football teams in a last-ditch effort to avoid the fate of other schools across the country that canceled their seasons because they did not have enough players.
The school district named Mr. Hogue, a former N.F.L. player who grew up in Yonkers, as head coach of the new hybrid team, the Yonkers Guardians. Some players had opposed the merger, worried they might not get along with their former crosstown rivals. Others figured it was their only option if they wanted to play football.
“We wanted a chance to have a senior season,” said Omar Areche, 17, a wide receiver who tried to convince his teammates that the plan made sense.
The experiment had been a series of highs and lows, with dominant wins at home and heartbreaking losses on the road. But in mid-October, with two games left in the regular season, the Guardians still had a shot at the playoffs.
“To come together and try to figure this out wasn’t easy,” Mr. Hogue told the players over a team dinner of pizza and pasta. “Some of you guys were with it. Some of you guys weren’t. But you made it happen. And now you are setting the foundation for something.”
Yonkers, the third largest city in New York state, had eight varsity football teams just a decade ago, one for each public high school. Now it is down to one. A diverse, working-class suburb on the northern edge of New York City, it is known for having an underfunded school system and a long history of racially segregated public housing.
Last Saturday, the Guardians faced the Mamaroneck Tigers as heavy underdogs with a 2-3 record. Mamaroneck, an affluent town 10 miles to the east, had their own cheerleaders. Yonkers did not. But the Guardians had hundreds of enthusiastic fans in the stands, rooting for them and waving posters with the players’ faces.
With about a minute left in the fourth quarter, the Guardians had a 12-0 lead. Their quarterback, Brendan Mulvihill, took the snap and, narrowly avoiding a sack, threw a deep pass down the sideline to Omar, who raced for a first down and deep into Tigers territory, sealing the victory. The players celebrated by sprinting across the field carrying a giant white flag with the team’s helmet logo.
Inside the locker room, the players took a knee as Mr. Hogue spoke.
“All season we’ve been beating ourselves, and we finally put it together,” he said.
For their final game, the Guardians traveled yesterday to a Hudson Valley village called Wappingers Falls to play Roy C. Ketcham High School. After mounting a furious comeback, Yonkers fell to Ketcham, 29-26. Whether the Guardians get into the playoffs now depends on the results of other games.
Across the state, high school football teams are fighting for survival. At least seven New York high schools, including four on Long Island, have canceled their varsity football seasons this year because they didn’t have enough players. Football is still America’s most popular boys’ sport. More than one million teenagers played last year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, which oversees high school athletics.
But over the past decade, the United States has lost about 40,000 players. Some high schools have addressed the decline in participation by playing games with six or eight players on the field instead of 11.
But the fact remains that full-contact football is now seen as a dangerous sport. Flag football has taken off as a safer alternative, and it will be an official Olympic sport for the first time at the Summer Games in Los Angeles in 2028.
On a recent evening in Yonkers, dozens of children, ranging from 9 to 14 years old, played in a flag football league, sprinting across Coyne Park with yellow flags dangling from their belts.
From the sidelines of one flag football game, Nick DeMatteis, 50, a high school teacher in New York City, watched his 11-year-old son Billy. Mr. DeMatteis grew up playing full-contact football, and he believes that the chronic migraines he has experienced are from football-related concussions he suffered as a boy.
“His brain is not turning into mashed potatoes while we’re playing this game,” Mr. DeMatteis said, gesturing toward his son.
Often teenagers are motivated to play traditional football by having the right coach, said Davis Whitfield, the federation’s chief executive officer.
“Sometimes you have a special coach walking the halls that gets kids excited about playing,” he said.
For decades, Yonkers had Coach Tony DeMatteo, who led Roosevelt High School to seven undefeated seasons, including the only state football championship in Yonkers history. In 2000, Mr. DeMatteo left to coach at a high school outside the city, and that was the start of a steady decline in Yonkers football. Many talented prospects left for stronger programs.
“The private schools and the Catholic schools come in there and take all the good players away,” Mr. DeMatteo, who retired from full-time coaching in 2021, said in an interview. “That really hurts Yonkers.”
In 2018, facing smaller rosters as well as rising financial pressures, the Yonkers school officials condensed the eight high school programs into two teams, the Force and the Brave.
Then, in a meeting at the Roosevelt High cafeteria in June, Yonkers officials gathered players from the two remaining teams to see how they felt about merging into one. The Force had won the last five games between the two teams, but they still had a heated rivalry.
Each player got a turn at the microphone to sound off. Gabriel Concepcion, a rising senior, argued that the merger could make the combined team more competitive. “We could go on a playoff run and hopefully win a championship if we all merge our talent together,” he said.
Mickey Salvato, 17, a linebacker for the Brave, was against the merger. “The Force players thought they were better than us,” he said recently. “There were a lot of egos and different personalities. I couldn’t see it happening.”
At first, it didn’t go smoothly. The Guardians began the season with nearly 100 varsity players. They disagreed over which team’s playbook to use. Some picked lockers next to their former teammates.
“It was very cliquey,” said Brendan, the quarterback who had played for the Force. “We had all these petty arguments.” Several players quit because they worried they weren’t going to get playing time with fewer available spots, and by mid-October, the roster had shrunk to about 40 players.
The new coach, Mr. Hogue, wanted to find a way to win, something that has been a challenge in Yonkers since his playing days. During his senior season at Roosevelt High School, the team was 1-7. Still, he was a standout. He went on to play at Syracuse University and then made it to the N.F.L. for a couple of seasons, playing for the Detroit Lions and the Carolina Panthers.
After leaving professional football, he decided to get a degree in physical education and return to Yonkers. He started a foundation with his sister, a former Yonkers basketball star, that offers free tutoring and takes local high school students to visit colleges. “I felt I could give so much more to the kids who come from where I come from, who went through the same struggles as I did,” he said. When the school district asked him to help the football program, he accepted.
As the head coach of the merged team, Mr. Hogue knew that his first obstacle would be getting the new team to bond. He took them to a New York Giants preseason game at MetLife Stadium in August.
He held a ceremony around a fire pit where he gave each player a piece of paper and some instructions. On one side, he said, describe how you portray yourself. Many wrote that they hoped to appear “tough” or “happy.” On the other side, he asked them to describe how they felt inside. Some shared that they were “depressed” or “not good enough.”
They read the words aloud then crumpled up the papers and threw them in the fire. The point of the exercise, Mr. Hogue said, “is to realize that everybody is in the same boat.”
The fire pit ceremony seemed to work. “Everybody got a little vulnerable,” he said. “We talked about starting anew. Ever since that day, everybody has bought in.”
A bigger question is whether Yonkers football can survive past this season. Mr. Hogue needs to build a pipeline of fresh talent, but parents’ fears over concussions has made it harder to attract players, he said. But for some teenagers, football can be a ticket out of Yonkers. For others, it offers a mental break.
“This is an escape from some of their living conditions, an escape from what might be stressing them out at home, an escape from the pressure they go through in school,” Mr. Hogue said. “Some of these kids are depressed. Coming here is an outlet where they can just be themselves.”
Brendan, now a senior, quit football during his freshman year because he felt he wasn’t good enough. Now he’s one of the team’s stars.
“When there’s a lot of stuff going on at home or off the field, I take all that and put it on the field,” he said.
Brendan’s father works for the Metro-North Railroad. His mother is in the army. Neither went to college. He hopes to play football in college next year and someday at the professional level. Mr. Hogue is a role model.
“He went to the N.F.L. from Yonkers,” Brendan said. “If he did it, why can’t I?”
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