Why are football sign-ups so early?
All sports are unique and come with their own set of challenges - football perhaps more than any other.  Here is a quick summary of some of the challenges we face:

Team size - Other sports have smaller teams (fewer players per team) and there is more flexibility in adding or consolidating teams in basketball, baseball, soccer, etc. as opposed to football.  If we have 28 registrations we could choose to have 3, 4 or 5 basketball teams, but we could only have 1 football team.

Coaches - Coaches are very important in any sport, but they are critical in football.  We experienced this first hand last year when we unexpectedly lost a couple of great head coaches just as season started (in 16 years this has never happened before).  Football is the only sport I know of where eleven players execute a plan every down.  There's a lot to know, a lot to teach, and EWJF works very hard to provide the best possible coaching in our program. It's virtually impossible to add teams last minute and put together a quality, successful coaching staff. 

Equipment - Football equipment and uniforms must be ordered several months in advance of the season.  For example, we ordered our jerseys in January.  It is very difficult and very expensive to get additional uniforms and equipment at the last minute.

Fields - Sports fields and facilities are always in short supply.  We have to confirm our field rentals and dates several months in advance and we're always faced with competition for fields with other sports such as soccer.

In a nutshell, football requires a lot of planning and logistics.  The earlier we know how many players we have, the more successful we can be.