News |

As CPS neighborhood high schools shrink, football teams vanish

The first game of the Chicago Public Schools’ football season was less than two weeks away when the players of Englewood’s Robeson High School gathered for practice on a humid August afternoon — all 11 of them.

That’s the bare minimum needed to field a team, but their coach, Fabray Collins, a Robeson alum and former NFL linebacker, was unfazed. While big suburban high schools regularly draw 100 or more players, Robeson has only 128 students. Collins knew he had to take what he could get.

“I tell the guys, ‘The No. 1 rule is you can’t get hurt,’ ” he said.

As the population of many Chicago neighborhood high schools dwindles, thinned by competition from charter and magnet schools, their athletic programs are also taking a hit. No sport is more endangered than football.

Fourteen CPS high schools dropped their teams this season, and while the casualties included Whitney Young, a 2,100-student colossus, most of the schools had fewer than 300 students.

A diminutive student body can make it difficult to field a squad in a sport that, thanks to specialized positions and frequent injuries, needs plenty of athletes. The Illinois High School Association has no minimum roster requirement, but teams that reached the state’s small school finals in recent years averaged 40 players.

Such participation is a pipe dream for many Chicago coaches. They say constructing even a bare-bones team means overcoming forces that are shrinking football participation nationwide — from parents’ fear of concussions to teens’ preference for video games — while also navigating complications unique to Chicago’s school district.

“When they took out elementary school football (in 2014), now you’re going back to the drawing board,” said longtime Harper High coach Maris Carroll, who had 25 players on his roster this year. “You’ve got to train the kid to play football. He won’t even know how to put on shoulder pads or strap on a helmet.”

The Robeson Raiders persisted through some of the toughest challenges the city could dish out, but on Friday, they finally met an obstacle they couldn’t overcome: CPS said Robeson will be one of four Englewood high schools that will close at the end of the academic year — the prelude to construction of an $85 million high school meant to keep more of the neighborhood’s children close to home when it opens in 2019.

Though CPS unveiled plans for the new campus last summer, the finality of the closing date still came as unhappy news. A few weeks earlier, Robeson Principal Melanie Beatty-Sevier had called football a force for good at the school, cutting down on discipline problems, nourishing school spirit and bonding alumni to their alma mater.

“It is the glue,” she said. “I just think it’s important to keep programs such as football in the schools if possible, especially when you have a small neighborhood school that’s struggling financially. You don’t want to just dismantle everything.”

Robeson High, named after the late activist, entertainer and college football star Paul Robeson, opened in 1977 at 69th Street and South Normal Boulevard. Designed for 1,500 students, its initial enrollment topped 2,300, forcing hundreds to attend the aging Parker School it was meant to replace.

Robeson’s football team, though, was small from the beginning. Coached by Roy Curry, a former Pittsburgh Steeler, it attracted just a few dozen kids to the roster.

“Kids found so many other things that they could do,” Curry said. “They worked, because they came from families where the income wasn’t that much. Back in those days, gang activity was very big too. And then, of course, a lot didn’t want to put out the work that was necessary to stay on the team.”

Those who endured had success: The 1982 squad, starring future Chicago Bear and current CPS athletic administrator Mickey Pruitt, was the first Public League team to make it to the state championship game, and came within a few seconds of winning.

Collins, a 1980 graduate who went on to play for Southern Illinois University and the Minnesota Vikings, took over in 2002. The school’s population hovered around 1,000 back then but started to plummet in 2008 as many Englewood families opted for charters and magnet schools.

Today, only 4 percent of kids who live within Robeson’s attendance boundaries go to school there. That grates on Collins, who said charters gobble up students only to offload them when they “mess up.”

But unlike other schools with plunging populations, Robeson football survived.

It began with recruiting. Collins, a security guard at the school, said he talked with prospective players about what the game has to offer.

“You have to get them to want to do something different with their lives because it’s rough out here for these teenagers,” he said. “You don’t know who’s after who out there on the streets. So I say just come out to the football field. Be a part of something positive.”

Once they showed up, Collins kept them coming back by feeding them before practice, giving them rides to the field and being tolerant — to a point — about kids who occasionally skipped because they needed to earn money, look after siblings or deal with family problems.

Lawrence Davis, a quicksilver junior who played running back, cornerback, kicker and kick returner, said Collins also knew when to use a light touch.

“He makes it fun,” Davis said. “We just go right behind him. We don’t let anything stop us.”

Over the years, some of Collins’ players were named to all-star teams, and a few earned athletic scholarships. One of them, 2008 grad Johnny Johnson, got a full ride to the University of Minnesota, and today works as a financial analyst for a hospital in Minneapolis.

He grew up across the street from Robeson, he said, and chose to go there because he bonded with its coaches when they led his youth football team.

“I wouldn’t have been as involved in any school but Robeson,” he said. “I trusted them, they trusted me. They knew my mother. They had known me since elementary school. Without football, I don’t know where I would have ended up.”

Such opportunities are disappearing at other CPS schools. According to IHSA records, nine schools dropped football before the season began, while five more disbanded their teams after a few games.

Coaches and principals at most of the affected schools did not return messages seeking comment. Those who did blamed football’s demise on several factors.

Classes at CPS start in early September, more than two weeks after the first game of football season, and many would-be players don’t show up until school is in session. By IHSA rule, they can’t participate in a game until they’ve had 12 days of practice, and by that time, the season is almost half-over.

“It just becomes this spiral that’s hard to recover from,” said Principal Ellen Marie Kennedy of Richards High, a 217-student school in the Back of the Yards neighborhood that went without a team this year after compiling a winning record in 2016.

Tilden Principal Maurice Swinney said the team at his school, whose student body numbers 250, started with 24 players this year. But after a 1-4 start — the lone win came by forfeit over Austin College and Career Academy, which mothballed its team before the season began — the roster was down to 13.

A CPS rule, not strictly enforced, says football teams must have 22 players to cut down on the risk of injury or forfeit, so Swinney disbanded the squad. He said, though, that he would like to co-op with other schools to keep football alive.

“Kids always want something to do,” he said. “They don’t want to just go home and sit around. They want to be in an environment where they get to enjoy their high school experience.”

CPS would not allow an athletics administrator to be interviewed, but spokesman Michael Passman said the sport’s decline “is consistent with a national trend.” High school football participation dropped 3 percent over the last five years, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Passman said the district was exploring the idea of creating multi-school football squads. CPS also offered schools that lost their teams the chance to play flag football, he said, “but there wasn’t sufficient interest to support the league.”

One notable exception to the dropoff is Phillips Academy, a neighborhood high school in Bronzeville run by the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Its football team has won two state championships in the last three years, and its student body has stabilized at more than 600 students after a sharp decline a decade ago.

Principal Matthew Sullivan said football’s success, along with academics that improved after AUSL took over in 2010, plays a big role in the school’s relatively robust attendance: About 100 boys were on this year’s team, an enormous roster by any measure.

“Once they’re in here, they feel they’re part of the family,” he said.

Robeson’s season began Aug. 27 with its annual alumni game against South Side rival Julian High. Hundreds of graduates of the two schools packed the parking lot outside of Gately Stadium, barbecuing, laughing and blasting old-school hip-hop and house music as the teams squared off.

One alum, Wonderful Watson, wore a customized red and black Robeson jersey emblazoned with an “84” for the year he graduated. Watching from the stands, he said football brought generations of alumni together, and though he knew Robeson’s days were numbered, he was hopeful school spirit would somehow survive.

“There is such a strong connection to the school,” he said. “There’s a lot of history and a lot of good memories, and we’re going to continue to hang onto that.”

Robeson brought only 19 players to the game, and Julian, a school of 500 students, had just 22. The game was close throughout, but when a final Robeson pass fell incomplete, Julian won 28-22.

Collins, wearing a crimson fedora that matched his team’s helmets, gently chastised his players’ work habits during his postgame speech but ended with praise.

“Get better — that’s all you’ve got to do,” he said. “Don’t hold your head down. You ain’t got nothing to be ashamed of.”

The season became no easier. Facing schools with much larger student populations, the Raiders endured a slew of blowouts and two heartbreaking close losses. Their only win came by forfeit over Uplift Community High School, which had dropped its team.

Along the way, the roster shrank. One player quit to hang out with his girlfriend. Another stopped showing up to practice. Others grew so frustrated by the losing that they argued with the coaches and got kicked off the team.

Toward season’s end, Robeson fielded just 15 players in a game against Lindblom Math and Science Academy, a selective enrollment school in West Englewood with more than 1,300 students — 45 of whom were on the football team.

There were other stark differences. Lindblom had a platoon of cheerleaders rooting on its team; Robeson had none. Lindblom’s sideline teemed with dozens of parents and students; Robeson’s had just a few.

Junior Chez’Paree Curney was among them. She said even with the tough season, Robeson’s football team had been a source of pride for the school.

“It still is important,” she said. “The boys out there, they’re doing something with their lives. They’re doing something that’s athletic, that’s good for them.”

The Raiders lost 48-0, doomed by turnovers, missed tackles and fatigue, but Collins was still upbeat after the game. He believed Robeson would remain open another year, and that he could create a formidable co-op team by fusing his underclassmen with athletes from other small schools.

But on Friday, he learned that that isn’t going to happen. CPS announced that Robeson will close at the end of the academic year, and that its students will get the chance to transfer to higher-performing schools in the area, or to larger neighborhood schools — Bogan, Chicago Vocational Career Academy, Gage Park and Phillips — that are four to five miles away.

Though Robeson’s players will get the chance to continue their football careers elsewhere — some are already working out in the weight room to prepare for next season — they will be Raiders no more. That was a hard reality to face for the man who kept the team going even as the students melted away.

“It’s like a tragedy,” Collins said. “No more football at Robeson? We’ve always been a competitive program. We’re one of the top 100 winningest schools in the state. Just to hear that it no longer exists, it’s really a sad thing.”

jkeilman@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @JohnKeilman