Many parents are turning their kids to soccer which studies show is no more if not less safer than football
Coming from a community which had a quality soccer program prior to having football, I understand the comment if you had football first. Manteno Youth Soccer Association runs the soccer program for Manteno, Grant Park, Beecher, Momence and Peotone, with an average of 1000+ kids in the program between the five communities ending in 8th grade. If you go back 25 years, pre-Manteno & Peotone youth football, they were usually closer to 1200 kids. Manteno regularly went deep in the soccer playoffs prior to playing football, and still is a annual conference favorite...Peotone not only does MYSA, but also has a more competitive league in town...Herscher also has a large youth program and a solid Tigers team, always towards the top with Manteno & Peotone...
Herscher has two youth football programs, one in Limestone and the other in Herscher...Manteno Wildcats' youth program attracts kids from Bradley & Bourbonnais. Peotone's Blue Demons have stabilized after not being able to fill a Varsity team in 2012.
The programs coexist & tolerate each other...Manteno's second head football coach guaranteed a very short stay by calling the soccer team "lawn fairies" early in his one year tenure, and then going winless...If you really want to see the victims of the soccer generation, go look at your cross country teams...soccer gutted the CC programs at Manteno, Herscher & Peotone to the point they are just now coming back.
Switching soccer seasons, boys to spring and girls to fall, won't solve any problems. In fact, it likely wrecks most smaller schools boys track programs - schools under 700 kids have enough trouble with filling baseball & track rosters. And the girls have four primary travel non-school sports: Volleyball, Basketball, Softball & Soccer. Reality says I've never seen a high school girl try a softball-soccer combination, in a community which actually won a 1A Soccer championship the same year it was 3A Softball runner up with no girls playing both.