High school tackle football participation rose again last year in Minnesota, a national survey showed Friday, as teams prepared for a new season.

The annual sport-by-sport participation survey from the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) said that last school year, 23,880 Minnesota athletes played high school tackle football — 11-player or nine-player.

That participation number has increased three straight years since bottoming out at 22,105 in the 2021-22 school year. At that time, the nation was recovering from the COVID pandemic, and concussion danger was turning away many potential players.

“As a state we’ve taken steps to prevent concussions, to make the game safer,” said Bryan Strand, president of the Minnesota High School Football Coaches Association. “I think more parents are seeing that, and they’re allowing their kids to play football.”

Football has the nation’s top high school participation by a wide margin, but nationally those numbers have remained fairly flat in recent years. The national number of 11-player boys participants increased slightly in the 2023-24 survey, then decreased this time, by less than 1%.

So it’s not a national trend, but Minnesota has seen an increase, with 696 more high school tackle football participants in 2024-25 than the year prior.

“We’re starting to see [increased participation] even up here in northern Minnesota, said Strand, who has coached Barnesville to nine consecutive state tournaments, including the 2022 Class 2A title.

Strand noted that players practice with padded Guardian Caps attached to their helmets. Also, state rules limit the number of fully padded practices each team can hold.

“It’s less old-school, where coaches are just going to do whatever they want to and bang and hit all the time,” Strand said. “… We basically will hit sleds, bags, and technique things. I can’t tell you the last time we went live in practice. We just don’t find it necessary. I don’t want to lose guys in practice.”

More from the NFHS survey

• Minnesota also showed notable participation increases last school year in boys golf (448 more participants than the previous year), boys soccer (872), boys track and field (543), girls track and field (396), girls volleyball (453) and girls wrestling (372).

• Boys volleyball, in its first year as an MSHSL-sanctioned sport, had 2,383 participants.

• The MSHSL doesn’t sanction girls flag football yet, but the NFHS survey showed 68,847 girls competed in flag football nationally last school year with nearly 1,000 additional schools offering the sport. Minnesota had a league sponsored by the Vikings with 51 participating schools.