Another football season has come and gone in Chatham County, and it wasn’t particularly one to remember.
This fall, the four-county football teams — Northwood, Seaforth, Chatham Central and Jordan-Matthews — finished with a combined overall record of 7-34, and only the 1-9 Bears made the playoffs. Teams in other sports across the county have made strides over the last decade, but Chatham’s high school football programs seem to be falling behind the rest of the state.
Since the start of the 2012 season, Chatham’s four schools are a combined 105-255 in football. Neither Central nor Jordan-Matthews have had a winning season over the last decade, while Northwood’s last — outside of going 6-3 during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season — is when the Chargers went 7-5 back in 2017.
So what’s holding Chatham County’s programs back? Coaches around the county say the high school teams are performing so poorly because Chatham County doesn’t offer football at its public middle schools.
“It’s kind of the elephant in the room,” said Jordan-Matthews head coach Ryan Johnson. “We’re hurting from the middle-school aspect … Things just aren’t going the way we want them to go right now.”
Chatham County is home to two public middle schools: Chatham Middle School and Margaret Pollard, though Horton Middle teaches grades 5-8. The rest of the schools in the county — Bennett, Bonlee, J.S. Waters, Moncure and Silk Hope — are all K-8.
Currently none of the eight schools offer football as a sport. As a result, many of the athletes who come into high schools wanting to play football have no gridiron experience. Some seeking to play leave the area altogether to find opportunities to play before they even reach high school.
“You can play all the way to 12U, but then after 12U you have to decide if you’re going to sit out a year or a year and a half, or am I going to go somewhere that has middle school football so I can play,” Johnson said. “It’s a dilemma. And you can’t blame parents or families. They’re making a hard decision.
Johnson, in his second season at Jordan-Matthews, says he had about 40 players on his roster during the peak of the season, but around 15 or 16 were freshmen who hadn’t played football before. The same was true at Seaforth, which competed as a varsity program for the first time this fall.
Northwood head coach Chris Kenan, who led the Chargers to a 4-6 record in 2022, says opposing coaches are often shocked when they hear about his team’s lack of experience.
“A lot of teams we play, the coaches can’t believe we don’t have a feeder school,” Kenan said. “A lot of people get here and are playing for the first time in the 9th grade. Other people, their 9th graders have two or three years of experience already. I think the guys have done a good job not using that as an excuse.”
That’s not to say there is absolutely no youth football in Chatham County. For the past several years, a group of volunteers built the East Chatham Chargers football program in Pittsboro.
Starting at 8U and going up to 14U, there are four different levels of play offered by the East Chatham football team, which plays its home games at Northwood.
Also playing for the first time this fall are the Siler City Jets 14U team, which is experiencing a solid amount of success as a new team. On Monday, the 14U Jets defeated the Durham Firebirds, 46-28, to advance to the finals of the East Wake Football League.
“It’s a bright spot, for sure,” Johnson said of the new program in Siler City. “Those kids and families are excited to have a little bit of that middle school experience. There are some great athletes over there, and for right now, they’re not thinking about going anywhere else. We’re trying to keep those guys at home.”
Even these youth programs have their issues though. Unlike with middle school teams, players have to pay a registration fee to participate with the ECC football teams, a potential roadblock for many lower-income families. Additionally, the introduction of Seaforth as a football program this season has given many people who would have previously played at Northwood a second option about where to spend their high school careers.
As far as this most recent season, Kenan said many of the players are attending Seaforth rather than Northwood. He worries that trend will continue in the future, but acknowledges driving up participation at ECC might be an answer to fixing some of the high school’s problems.
“I’d like to see more kids take advantage of ECC,” Kenan said. “I think right now that’s the only way we can bridge the gap with other teams across the state. I think we have to look at this as a state-wide thing and not just a county thing, because we’re not just competing county-wide. We’re competing state-wide. We’re already at a huge disadvantage not giving our kids the same opportunities as others in the state. We’re a public school.”
Of course, Chatham County is not the only area in the state, or the country, currently grappling with problems on the football field.
According to data provided by the National Federation of State High School Associations, participation in 11-man football fell 3.2% nationally from 2018-19 to 2021-22. And for the first time in several years, the total number of players playing high school football nationwide fell below one million.
There are several factors at play when considering the dropoff in participation. Part of it can be explained by the increase in participation in other forms of football. From 2018-19 to 2020-21, the number of schools nationwide to offer 6-, 8- or 9-man alternatives for football jumped up 12.7%.
Still, many athletes are giving up football altogether to pursue safer alternatives. The last several years have been flooded with data linking football with CTE — a progressive brain condition thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head or repeated concussions.
These issues are not new, and ones that county coaches know they’re going to have to deal with over the next several years. To make it out the other side, the county coaches they’ll need support from the community.
“Hopefully people will start to notice and put more investments in football around here,” said Seaforth head coach Terrance Gary. “It’s such a small little area, and we only have four schools. We’re going to have to put in work, and (the other schools) are going to have to put in work, as well.
Sports Editor Jeremy Vernon can be reached at jeremy@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @jbo_vernon.