I will say it again. Chapel Hill should have one high school football team.

Just because Chapel Hill has three high schools, why does it need three football teams in a town where football is not very popular among the kids, who win state championships galore in a bunch of other sports? They should have turned off the Friday night lights, which was an embarrassing case in point on opening night.

The three local high schools all were shut out and outscored by a whopping 137-0. Chapel Hill got hammered by Durham Riverside, 35-0, East Chapel Hill opened at home and was blistered by Northern Vance of Henderson, 42-0, and Carrboro, well, Carrboro was demolished by Cedar Ridge, 60-0. Yep, that adds up to 137-zip.

This is nothing against the coaches who work their tails off at each school and the kids who do come out play hard and some of them are pretty good, but there simply aren’t enough of them. Chapel Hill has only 31 on its roster; East Chapel Hill isn’t much better with 35 and Carrboro, surprisingly, has the most, 41 players.

Those roster numbers aren’t way off the norm, even for bigger schools with more established programs. But for high schools that really take football seriously, the sport is year round with informal workouts and individual players training during the entire off-season. You have to believe that most of the players on local teams are what former East Carolina coach Pat Dye used to call “skinny-legged kids.”

But you can’t take three separate high schools and make one football team from them. Why not? Has anyone ever asked and offered it as an alternative to one or two of the schools putting up the pads for good? Carrboro and East Chapel Hill excel in so many other sports, and coaches there have to recruit kids to come out for the football team; forget getting them to work out in the off-season.

Chapel Hill has three high schools for a reason – the money is here to build more schools and have better student-teacher ratios and programs that benefit everybody. Football, it seems, isn’t benefiting anybody. Well, something’s gotta give this week. Carrboro plays at East Friday. Can anyone say scoreless tie?