 Parents across the nation are becoming concerned with the safety in football. Registration for high school football has declined across the state of Minnesota and has resulted in one school cancelling their varsity season. The Pine River Backus Tigers will not field a varsity team after only one senior and a handful of juniors register to play this season. The team will have a JV team and the few upperclassmen Pine River has will be eligible to play on the JV squad. The decision comes over the safety of the student athletes. We'd be looking at a lot of potentially eighth and ninth graders that physically aren't there and haven't played that level of football obviously at this point. And so it really just became as much as we hate screwing up other people's schedules because that's a factor. We also got to look at the safety of our students and make sure that we're not putting anybody in a dangerous position and we feel like we would have been. The school does have a strong number of players at the younger levels and the Tigers hope to be back with a varsity team next fall.