Southampton To Field Its First Varsity Football Team Since 2019 This Fall

When the 2023-2024 athletic season officially opens this upcoming Monday, Southampton will field its first varsity football team since 2019, athletic director Darren Phillips confirmed last week.

The decision comes, at least in part, after a highly successful, and unexpected, junior varsity season a year ago in which the Mariners, after not fielding a team at all either at the junior high or JV levels in 2021, went 5-2 including victories over perennially talented programs. Phillips also pointed to the fact that he’s continually checked in with players over the course of several months who have reassured him that they plan on playing this upcoming season. Included in that group of about 20-plus student-athletes who have shown up regularly to offseason workouts, Phillips said, are eight seniors, who without a varsity team would not be able to play otherwise since they’re not allowed to play JV.

“For some of these kids it’s their last chance to ever play organized football,” he said. “Whether or not we’ll have enough players for a JV and varsity is still up in the air, but that is the goal, to have both. There’s always a concern to have just varsity because then you worry about the kids in the lower grades, like the ninth-graders, and whether or not they’ll stick around if they’re not getting a lot of playing time. But at the last meeting we held we had about 40 kids sign up and say they’re interested in playing, and that’s really what you need, 40 to 45 players, to have a JV and varsity, so hopefully we’ll have enough kids for both.

“We’re excited to have it back,” Phillips said of football, which he was at one time the head coach of. “No one’s expecting any miracles here this season but I know a lot of the kids wanted to play varsity so we’ll give it a shot, see how it goes. We have some ground to make up but I know the coaching staff and the players will do the best they can to be ready. The season comes quick and the kids haven’t played at that level so it’ll be a big adjustment from last year.”

Franklin Trent, the director of student safety and security within Southampton School District, will be stepping in as the new varsity head coach. Edgar “Hikey” Franklin, the head coach of last year’s JV team, couldn’t make the commitment to the team this season, but Trent is no stranger to Southampton football. Like Franklin, Trent played football during his time at Southampton. He’s a 1995 graduate of the school and played under Vinny Mangano, who instilled in him and all of his teammates during that era, “Mariner Pride,” as he recalled and what he wants to instill in today’s players.

“A lot of what we’ll be trying to do is bring some of that stuff that led us to being so successful then,” Trent said. “There’s a new flavor, a new spirit here but we’re still looking to keep that tradition of Mariner Pride going and Coach Mangano, that was his thing, that’s all him.

“But the whole point of me being a part of this all is to try and revitalize the program, so I will be reaching out to the community and the parents and making sure all are involved,” he added. “We have to be transparent with this program and there needs to be a level of inclusion that maybe there hasn’t been in recent years. We want all people and all types of students to come out for the team, and we’re not going to play, or not play, some players due to some sort of pecking order. Of course the best kids will play more than others, but I think in recent years some coaches just stuck to their script, meanwhile there are 10 to 14 kids who never see the field. So what we want to do is instill some confidence in these kids and play all of them. Otherwise you lose them.”

Trent said there are also plans in place to help build a feeder program. Whether that’s a Pop Warner team or league or flag football, the idea is for it to be a community-based program, not necessarily run out of already established surrounding programs.

“We want young people, and we want to bring them up through the ranks,” Trent said. “Now that’s a tall order, there aren’t as many students here as there used to be and the landscape is changing, but we still have to recruit in our communities. We need to be breeding this football team and establish it as a program. We want your little brother on the field on game day and bringing the water bottles to the players during timeouts, just as much as we want your little sisters being cheerleaders on the sidelines. We want everyone involved.”

Trent will be surrounded by what is an overall talented and highly experienced group of football coaches. Joe Messina has experience coaching football within the Sachem School District and will be the head coach of the JV team and be the varsity team’s offensive coordinator. Dwight Singleton played at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville under then head coach Johnny Major and was a teammate of NFL Hall of Famer Reggie White and has coached and held athletic director positions at various schools in Suffolk County. He’ll lead the defense, while Ryan Sommers, who played football at perennial powerhouse William Floyd, is also on the staff along with longtime coach and a former Mariner himself, Eddie West.

Phillips couldn’t say whether or not the district could sustain a football program, at least in the traditional sense, beyond this season and that things are very much taken now on a year-to-year basis. With numbers declining in various pockets on Long Island, Phillips has approached Section XI many times with different avenues the county can go down to help keep the sport alive, at least in the communities where interest has seen a steep dropoff. He’s researched 8 v. 8 football, which has seen success upstate and has its own championship now, but to no avail, at least so far. For now, Southampton is back on varsity, for this season, and the steps to sustainability will hopefully reveal themselves in the future.

“This year is not so much about winning and losing. Football is a sport that not many can play after high school, so for many of them, this will be their last chance to go out and play,” he said. “It’ll be a challenge but they’ll have the opportunity to play. It’s going to be a process and I think if the kids can stick with it and are committed to an offseason program, then we’ll be competitive as a football program.”