It's been nearly a decade since Mike Oliva first came to coach football at Pearl River, and plenty has changed since then. When he arrived in 2014, the local Pop Warner scene wasn't in great shape. There were no teams for fifth and sixth graders. At the higher levels, Pearl River had enough players for a modified, junior varsity and varsity squad, but numbers were sometimes thin. "There were some years where we had to fold JV in the middle of the year," Oliva said. "We always started with a JV, but there were some years early on where halfway through the year, we didn't have enough players to field at varsity. That was also a combination of we were in Class A back then, playing some tough schools, but we had to fold and make it like a Varsity B situation where there were kids who didn't really get to play on varsity." Amid rising concerns about player safety and head injuries during the mid-2010s, NY statewide football participation declined. Paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, the ...