Wednesday night lights: Auburn High leaning on JV football after nixing varsity team (2024)

RINER — Two teams ran through their warmups, sent their captains to midfield for a coin toss, stood at attention for the national anthem and then engaged in battle at Henry Sink Memorial Field in front of spectators.

Auburn High School’s season-opening football game against Narrows looked mostly like any other. The difference? It was a Wednesday night.

“It’s not what you want to be doing,” Eagles head coach Scott Mikowicz said.

Hump day is the new Friday for Auburn High School football. After a group comprised of Mikowicz, athletic director Paul Dominy and principal David Hurd decided to cancel the varsity season this year, the junior varsity squad is now the marquee team in Riner.

With dwindling participation numbers among upperclassmen in recent years, leading to shorthanded rosters, injuries and curtailed varsity seasons, Auburn is hoping a JV-only team this fall, accompanied by middle school and youth teams, will yield positive results in the form of growth on the gridiron and returning players.

It’s a move that Dominy hopes will end in the school resurrecting the varsity program.

“We’re taking one step back to eventually take two steps forward,” Dominy told the Times.

Eagles going extinct

It’s been a tumultuous few seasons for Auburn’s varsity football squad.

Beyond the fact it hasn’t produced a winning season since 2015, it’s managed to win just four games in the past four years, going winless in the fall 2021 season and in 2022.

In both of those years, the Eagles played just four and five games, respectively, having to cancel the remainder of their seasons due to an insufficient number of players because of injuries to younger players. The program fell victim, Dominy said, to the nationwide decline in participation in high school football — a 12.2% decrease in the 2021-22 season from its peak in 2008-09, according to the most recent National Federation of High School survey — and has never recovered.

“That’s what we’ve been doing for years here,” Mikowicz said. “We barely have enough to play, we barely make it through the season and sometimes, like last year, we had to stop the game at halftime. We’re starting six or seven freshmen, and they get hurt and then they don’t want to play football anymore.”

Auburn, a Class 1 institution, clocked in at 280 students at the most recent VHSL alignment, which came in March 2022. That makes it the 41st smallest VHSL school out of 317 members.

Through the first few practices of this season at Auburn, just one senior and one junior showed up out of a list of two dozen players. This comes off the heels of a full 10-game campaign the Eagles started and finished in 2023, going 2-8 with a blowout win over Craig County and a two-possession victory over Eastern Montgomery.

Less than a week into practices, the decision was made to nix the varsity season, not wanting a squad composed mostly of undersized, inexperienced freshmen and sophom*ores squaring off against the physically superior talent of the Mountain Empire District.

“We just didn’t have any upperclassmen,” Mikowicz said. “They just decided they weren’t going to play, and our district is way too hard to go out there with a bunch of freshmen playing against Galax and George Wythe and Grayson County, and every one of them.”

Mikowicz, who is now in his second season leading the Eagles football program, and Dominy are still trying to zero in on why their community’s participation numbers are so low, but for now they’re leaning on their sub-varsity squad.

“I can’t tell you how disappointed I am, but now all of our focus is on these young guys, and that’s what we’re doing,” Mikowicz said. “Turning the page.”

Autumn at Auburn

In addition to Wednesday evening being the night for high school football in Riner this fall, the product on the field might look a little modest.

Eagles starting quarterback Cam Branch recognizes that and the undertaking he and his young teammates have as both the current and next generation of the Auburn football program. The freshman signal-caller doesn’t have a mentor to learn from, but he’s prepared to guide his JV comrades into battle.

“I mean someone’s got to step up,” he said. “So obviously the quarterback is the position where you have to be the leader, so you have to step up, try to provide for your team and be the best spirit; lift them up, tell them they’re all right. You’ve just got to provide for your whole team.”

The Eagles got off on the right track in their opener, rolling past Narrows 46-0 in front of a decent home crowd.

Auburn has made efforts to get its community to support the JV team in the wake of canceling the varsity team, even producing and publishing a “hype video” ahead of Wednesday’s game, emphasizing the importance of backing the young players as they look to grow on the field.

“We want them to have a good experience,” said Dominy, who hopes the community involvement will lead to returning players next year.

“We’re doing our best and providing for our community,” said Branch, who scored two touchdowns in the Eagles’ opener. “(We’re) striving forward and we’re hoping that we’re going to stay together and we’re going to keep pushing forward and win a state championship.”

The Eagles will soar again

Canceling the varsity season was a temporary measure, and its return may be sooner than you think.

The plan is to bring back the varsity team next year, Dominy said. This fall is an opportunity for the underclassmen in the program to learn the game, grow in it, and then make the jump to varsity in 2025 when they’ve gotten bigger, faster and stronger.

“This will be our varsity team next year. Hopefully we’ll get a few of the would-be seniors back, so we’ll see what happens,” Mikowicz said. “We’re hoping this is the thing that turns the page for us and these kids go up and are ready to compete next year at the varsity level. And I think all of them will be.”

With the axing of Auburn’s varsity season, teams on the Eagles’ originally planned schedule can choose between recording their matchup as a forfeited win, ruling the game a no-contest and using the date as a bye week or trying to replace the game with another opponent.

The Eagles’ Week 1 opponent, Region 1C foe Narrows, is currently looking to replace its Oct. 4 bye week with a game and take its scheduled game with Auburn as a no-contest.

Auburn hopes its regularly scheduled varsity programming will return next fall.

“It’s just so sad that we’re not having football on Friday nights, so the push has been to try and support these young guys because they’re the future,” Mikowicz said. “They’re the future of the program at this point and there’s nothing else we can do about it except put all our efforts into these young guys and just try to get better and better and better.”