Last season, the New Ulm Eagles girls basketball team had a combined 17 players for the varsity and B-squad teams.

Of those 17 girls, five were seniors, leaving 12 players who can return next year.

And because of low numbers, for the first time New Ulm High School could not field a C-squad team — a feeder system for both upper-level teams.

“Our middle school had a good number of girls out for basketball,” New Ulm High School head girls basketball coach Mitch Lewis said. “We had 23 girls out for basketball there and I do not know how many of them are going to continue to play in high school. But it is going to be interesting — numbers have been an issue.”

But Lewis believes that there are some good numbers coming up in the lower grades with some good athletes.

“We just had a couple of classes with low numbers and sometimes you have to run that roller coaster,” he said. “New Ulm has done that for years where we climb, have good numbers and good teams — it ebbs and flows. But right now we are going to be in that downward numbers game. But I think it will come back.”

But Lewis knows that numbers for girls basketball is not just a problem for New Ulm.

“Just about every coach that I talk to this year was low on numbers,” he said. “So it is not just a New Ulm thing — it is state-wide.”

Next year, Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart will not field a girls varsity basketball team, while Minnesota Valley Lutheran will have a varsity, B- and C-squads.

New Ulm Cathedral had 16 girls out for basketball in grades 8-12, Cathedral Athletic Director Alan Woitas said.

“We had grades six through seven combined for a junior high team and we had 16 girls there,” he said. “We graduate two seniors next year, so if everyone comes back we will have 30 kids.”

He added that teams are a little thin on numbers.

“But everyone [in the Tomahawk Division] as of this year will be able to play a varsity and JV schedule with the exception of BLHS — they do not have a JV and next year they will not have a varsity. There are not a ton of numbers — they have gone down a bit.”

Woitas said that the Greyhounds will still play BLHS in JV games next season.

Woitas said there is a general decline in numbers for high school girls basketball around the state.

“There are a lot of options in the winter,” he said. “We have a number of girls that play hockey, we have quite a few girls in dance and gymnastics. And some girls want to focus on one sport.”

When asked for his opinion for the declining numbers, Lewis said that high school basketball is a long season.

“It goes from November to March, so it is a long season and a lot of work so you definitely have to dedicate yourself to basketball during the season,” Lewis said. “And the girls that succeed during the season are the ones who put in the time during the offseason — AAU, working out and with trainers.”

Trevor Slette, President of the New Ulm Basketball Association (NUBBA) said that in their kindergarten through sixth-grade program, NUBBA had 51 girls participate this year.

“But for the second year in a row we did not have a seventh- or eighth-grade girls NUBBA team,” he said. “This year we had four girls sign up for seventh grade — we were hoping that we could get a team together — but it just did not work.”

Slette said that in the younger grades, there were eight girls who signed up in second grade, with seven third-grade girls signing up. There were 11 in the fourth grade and seven in the fifth grade.

“Our sixth grade girls are is our biggest with 12 girls signed up,” Slette said.

Seventh grade had four girls, with no girls signing up in the eighth grade.

“But that does not mean that they did not sign up for the junior high season at the school,” he said.

Slette said that big thing that NUBBA is doing now to increase numbers is involving former NUHS girls basketball coach Brian Batt.

“We opened up our practice facility that we are renting and getting the girls more involved during the summer and offseason,” Slette said. “And Brian is just wonderful for the kids — we want to get more girls out and a positive experience. We want to get some of the players on our high school teams to help. We want to do things differently than we have in the past.”

Slette said that the peak number of girls in their program was 82 in the summer of 2019.

“But when COVID hit it made a decline in youth sports,” he said. “This year was 51 which is the lowest numbers that we have had in the past 10 years. But overall, girls basketball is down nation-wide too — it is quite significant and no one has pinned it down. It surprises me that girls basketball as a whole has declined in the Caitlin Clark era.”