WASHINGTON — It’s no secret that fewer and fewer high schoolers are playing football. That’s not the case in the nation’s capital though.

Nationwide participation in high school football is down for the fifth year in a row, marking seemingly uncharted territory for the participation rates across all high school sports. For the first time in 30 years, overall athletic participation in high schools across the United States declined during the 2018-19 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

The almost-eight-million participants still ranks as the third-highest total in recorded history. However, almost single-handedly responsible for the 43,395-participant drop-off is now-former football players, who account for 70% of the overall decline.

The fifth consecutive year of decline for football signals its lowest total since the 1999-2000 school year. The past decade saw a nearly 10% decline in students playing football; if that trend continues, the number of participants this year could drop below one million for the first time in the 21st century.

Football — despite the steady decline — is still far and away the nation’s most popular sport, however, with its over-one-million student-athletes nearly doubling the roughly 600,000 participants of outdoor track and field, the United States’ second-most popular high school sport.

The nation’s capital is headed in a completely different direction when it comes to the same participation statistics. Football — along with sports overall — has been on the rise in Washington.

Since the 2013-14 school year, the number of students playing football in the district has doubled. The cause of this shift is simply a significant increase in the amount of schools with football programs. Only 12 schools offered 11-player football in 2013; now, there are 29 schools competing on the gridiron.

More charter schools popping up across Washington has likely contributed to the increase in programs, said Dwayne Foster, the executive director of the District of Columbia Interscholastic Athletics Association.

Foster, who oversees the entirety of athletics for District of Columbia Public Schools from fourth grade through 12th grade, is encouraged by DCIAA’s success in building engagement across football and all sports. Washington has seen participation in high school sports spike by 43% over the past six years.

Perhaps the primary reason for the nationwide trend is parents’ concerns about concussions and brain injuries.

Kimberly Archie first became involved in the conversation surrounding brain injuries when her 24-year-old son Paul died in a motorcycle accident. The autopsy after her son’s death revealed that he had stage 1 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which was the result of playing youth football, Archie said.

Paul had played football from ages 7 to 15. Not once had he shown any signs of a concussion or brain injury, Archie said.

Archie, alongside other families that have lost loved ones to CTE, founded Faces of CTE, an advocacy group with the goal of raising awareness surrounding brain injuries caused by repetitive hits to the head.

Concerns about head injuries from football is nothing new, however, Clarkson University history professor Stephen Casper said.

Concerns over head injuries in football can be traced back to the 1890s, said Casper, who holds a PhD in medicine and studies the history of concussions. The historical trend has been for concerns to enter the mainstream before the steam wears off, and then the cycle starts up again, Casper said.

For the current decline to have statistical relevance, there would need to be at least 10 years of steady decline, Casper said. While the trends of the 21st century are interesting to Casper, there is not enough evidence to suggest the cycle has been beat, he said.

“If we want to see some sort of metric on how much things can change in a period of four years, consider that Barack Obama was president and Donald Trump became president,” Casper said.

Tim Vidale, a Washington-based physical therapist specializing in sports injuries, agreed that it’s too early to tell, also pointing out that because Washington is a small sample size, a small uptick in the number of students playing football can look more significant than it is. Vidale, however, is slightly more believing in the possibility of football’s demise.

“Over the next 40 to 50 years, you’ll see football as a whole really change or cease to exist in the way that we know it,” Vidale said.

In Washington, the difference in trends seems to be based in valuing football differently. Richard Wright Public Charter School’s football coach Garrette Ferguson said that for a lot of kids, playing football is about having a support system they may not have elsewhere.

“They get more attention, more love away than they do at home,” Ferguson said. “Some kids just want to be on teams. They don’t really want to play — and they’ll tell you.”

The support system of a sports team is not the only reason to encourage participation in high school athletics.

“Our data shows that our student-athletes have higher GPAs than our non-student-athletes,” Foster said. “Our data shows, all right, that our student-athletes graduate at a higher level than the non-athletes. Our data shows that attendance is better for our student-athletes than the non-athletes.”

(Foster did not respond to a request for access to such data.)

In addition to an increase in Washington high schools offering football programs, Foster credits revamped middle school programs for acting as “automatic feeders” into high schools. Increased engagement at the middle school level has trickled up to the high school level, Foster said.

DCIAA also hosts a series of seminars at the public high schools aiming to educate student-athletes about every step of the college process, including recruitment and how to get scholarships.

Scholarships, Ferguson said, are one of the primary motivating factors behind students wanting to play football. Ferguson said that football, more so than any other sport, gives kids the chance to earn large scholarships at good colleges.

The concerns responsible for the decline across the rest of the country do not go unheard in Washington, though.

“What’s important is to really talk about safety,” Foster said. “A skill set needs to be developed at a younger age than 14, so that they can learn how to properly tackle.”

In addition to teaching proper tackling techniques, DCPS has full-time athletic trainers who are equipped to handle any injuries that occur, Foster said.

Casper was critical of this perspective, however, saying that the “the game is safer than ever” argument has been recycled since the late 1960s and early 70s without the risk of brain damage changing. This argument has survived because of how slowly education on concussions has spread.

If you’re immersed in studying head injuries as a scholar, researcher, journalist or advocate, for example, then the danger is “omnipresent,” Casper said. The general public has not picked up on this information in the same way.

“This exposure... it’s a lot more dangerous than people realize,” Casper said.

At the end of the day though, said Ferguson, football provides a lifeline for students.

“Kids in the district need it,” Ferguson said. “That’s why more and more kids are playing.”