Alamance County’s recreation director has confirmed her commitment to the county’s peewee football league even as her department inaugurates a new play book for other county-sponsored athletics.
Jamie Merchel, the county’s parks and recreation director, formally declared her intention to continue the beset football program when she appeared before the county’s board of commissioners on Monday to address a recent dustup over her department’s changing approach to youth sports.
The commissioners had originally put Merchel through her paces a month earlier after a group of indignant parents confronted them about rumors that the recreation department planned to phase out tackle football and other popular team sports.
In her return appearance on Monday, Merchel acknowledged that her department plans to disband its baseball and basketball leagues in order to offer these sports in a more “curriculum”-based format. She added, however, that she and her staff will preserve the peewee football league as long as it has teams willing to come to grips on the gridiron.
“As long as those teams want to play and they want to play each other, that league will continue,” Merchel asserted. “It’s not going away, and it’s not being replaced by flag football…But we want to make it as strong as possible so that it doesn’t disappear.”
Merchel conceded that the past 15 years have seen a marked reduction in the league’s number of teams, which are independently raised and equipped by various groups that choose to compete under the county’s umbrella. Currently, the league comprises five football clubs – three of which are privately sponsored while the other two have been fielded by the recreation departments in Mebane and Gibsonville. Merchel said that her department will continue to organize game play among these teams even if they continue to dwindle in number.
In the meantime, however, Merchel said that she and her staff have introduced an entirely new approach to other team sports, be they traditional offerings like baseball and basketball or pastimes like kickball and volleyball that the county hasn’t historically hosted.
The county’s recreation director explained that the county’s parks and commission has given her staff the go-ahead to adopt a pick-up, or “tip-off model,” for youth athletics in response the steady erosion of interest in her department’s traditional sports leagues. Under this model, the department will assemble children who sign up for a particular sport at one of the county’s six recreation facilities. In each case, participants will receive instruction and coaching before they’re split up into teams whose composition will change every couple of weeks.
This organizational principle differs considerably from the county’s historic approach to youth sports, which saw the recreation department serve as a vector for independently-raised teams that played each other for annual titles. Merchel acknowledged that this model worked well as long as the county had a fair number of teams that wanted to compete under its auspices. She added, however, that a variety of factors has made this model increasingly hard for the rec department to sustain.
“The number one factor is drop in participation,” she admitted. “Both on an organizational level and on an individual level, we have had a steep drop in participation over the last two decades.”
According to the recreation department, the participation numbers for football have gone from a high of 820 players in 2010 to the current figure of 435. The decrease has been even more marked for the basketball league, which fell from 2,340 participants in 2004 to 415 in 2024, while the county’s rosters for baseball and softball have plummeted from 3,450 in 1994 to their current total of 328.
The department’s records also show a precipitous decrease in the number of participating teams. In fact, the five clubs presently enrolled in the football program are an embarrassment of riches compared to the four-member basketball league or the three teams that currently play county baseball.
Aside from addressing this drop-off in participation, the rec department also has a number of other goals for its new organizational model. Guil Johnson, the county’s athletics director, told the commissioners that he and his colleagues plan to broaden their offerings to attract more young people – and in particular girls – who have been overlooked in the county’s traditional tripartite emphasis on football, baseball, and basketball.
“Kids are looking for the thing that they care about, and a lot times, it’s not one of the three things that we offer.” Johnson told the county’s governing board. “We’re hoping to find solutions to that with the new model…and the county believes this is the way forward to revitalize our youth athletics program.
Johnson added that the rec department has already launched this nontraditional approach with its new programs in volleyball and kickball, as well as a panathletic curriculum called “intro to sports.” Johnson said that more than 100 kids have already signed up for these new offerings – while participation among young girls has increased about 30 percent overall.
Merchel said that the department will eventually apply the same model to baseball and basketball, while football will continue to be run on the traditional lines as a battle royale among independent clubs. The county’s rec director added that, in the best of all worlds, she and her colleagues would offer the new model alongside the traditional, team-based approach.
“We could do both,” she conceded, “but not with our existing resources.”
The department’s departure from its traditional tack for youth sports has nevertheless drawn a collective Bronx cheer from a number of parents whose kids are still eking it out on the county’s playing fields.
Last month, the commissioners heard from several of these furious football fraus who were convinced that the rec department had given up on the ol’ pigskin. On Monday, the commissioners were treated to some additional remarks from Roxanne May, who argued that the department’s plans amount to a crass substitution of team competition for a soppy alternative where winning is no longer the object.
“You’re only setting kids up for failure by always giving them an award just for showing up,” May declared during a designated public comment period that evening. “Not everyone deserves a trophy…Participation trophies should stop being handed out at around the age of seven or eight.”
The commissioners nevertheless found much to root for in Merchel’s account of the recreation department’s policy change.
Commissioner Bill Lashley, a self-identified alumnus of the county’s sports leagues, insisted that the recreation director and her colleagues seem to be making the best of an untenable situation for their youth athletics program.
“I actually believe that participation for kids in the county is up,” he added. “But the reason we don’t have as many kids in the county league is that there are so many other options.”
The conflicting demands on the county’s youth also left an impression on Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners.
“There’s a lot of things that are creating competition for the parks,” he asserted. “We just have to do the best job we can for those [kids] that have no other choice.”
Meanwhile, John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners suggested that he and his colleagues may be willing to put some more skin in the game if the rec department can show it can increase participation in traditional sports.
“If you get to the point where you have more sign ups,” he said, “come back to use and ask for more resources – for more money.”
