It may not be the majority in Orange County, but there have been a lot of people waiting for tonight in Hillsborough, White Cross, Efland and even Mebane.
It’s’ been 735 days since the Cedar Ridge varsity football team has won a game. It came against Carrboro at Red Wolves Stadium.
Whether that’s an omen for tonight is up for the reader to decide, but Carrboro will visit Hillsborough again tonight with a 30% chance of rain in the forecast.
But what’s transpired between the Red Wolves’ last triumphant moment on the gridiron and tonight has tested the Cedar Ridge community, led to the departures of two head coaches, and incurred the wrath of Cedar Ridge parents toward the Orange County School System, including recently departed Superintendent Todd Wirt.
The sport of football, still the most valuable fuel that keeps the engine of high school sports pumping, had a existential crisis locally last August. The Friday nights in Red Wolves Stadium were never as solemn as they were in 2008, when Cedar Ridge didn’t field a varsity team.
When the Orange County School System made the announcement in June 2018, it caught many by surprise, not the least of which head coach Scott Loosemore, who departed for an assistant’s job with Scotland County soon afterwards.
After the district’s announcement, submitted in a Tweet, tensions boiled over the following Monday. School officials curiously scheduled a town hall meeting at Cedar Ridge cafeteria to discuss the future of football at 6:30 PM. It just so happened that the Orange County School Board met at Gravelly Hill Middle School at 7PM that same night, making it impossible for parents who wanted to sound off to both then-Principal Heather Blackmon and Superintendent Wirt (who was at the board meeting). The timing of the two meetings was no coincidence, and it only served to deepen the divide when several parents drove to Efland to give school board members (none of whom had any role in canceling the varsity season) a piece of their minds just as the meeting was finishing.
Several school board members stayed well after the session ended to listen to concerns, but some of the exchanges were hardly civil.
All of that is now in the past, but it wouldn’t be a Cedar Ridge football training camp without some adversity. On July 29, moments before the Red Wolves were ready to start its first practice, head coach Antonio King informed Athletic Director Andy Simmons he was leaving to become a running backs coach at North Carolina Central University.
The following morning, Torrean Hinton was barely awake when he received a phone call inquiring if he would be interested in become varsity coach. He accepted.
For seniors like wide receiver K.J. Barnes, Braedon Thompson, Braxton Mergenthal, Jaikel Gibbs and Zachary Holmes, tonight’s game isn’t just about trying to win.
Just as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote that “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” this Cedar Ridge team can achieve something without winning.
They can start a healing process for an athletic program that’s been overwhelmed with coach and player defections for the past year. None of that can be solved in one night.
But the bottom line is Friday nights are back at Cedar Ridge.
The Red Wolves will travel hopefully tonight.
And not a moment too soon.