Numlock Sunday: January 27, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Michael Weinreb of The Ringer who a few weeks ago wrote “The Fight Over the Future of Football Has Become a Battle for California’s Soul”. Here's what I wrote about it:

Florida, Texas and California produce the largest numbers of college and professional football players. While Florida and Texas have seen decreasing participation in high school football, California is ground zero for the decline of football in the U.S. During the 2009-10 season, California had 104,224 high school players at 1,029 schools. In the 2017-18 season, that fell to 94,286 players at 877 schools. The number of players in the Golden State has fallen about 3 percent every year. Meanwhile, participation in youth sports in California is at an all-time high, with boy’s soccer participatio…