According to the data, the US lost just over 100k HS football players over the last decade pre-COVID (
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267955/participation-in-us-high-school-football/)
Given that California makes up 11.9% of the US population (39.7M out of 333.7M), having them account for 10% (10k out of 100k) of the decrease in HS football players actually indicates that they're doing better than the rest of the US as a whole.