Win or lose on Friday night’s season-finale at Auman Stadium, Chapel Hill’s players will probably walk off the field in a double-file formation.
That’s Issac Marsh’s way. He doesn’t stop coaching his players once the game ends. As a special needs teacher at CHHS, he knows proper tutelage is needed throughout a young person’s life.
When Chapel Hill didn’t field a varsity football team in 2018, it was heartbreaking for many longtime high school football fans. Just four years prior, Chapel Hill had played in the 3-AA Eastern Regional Championship game, losing to Northern Guilford.
Then again, perhaps the cancellation of a season was the only logical extension for Marsh. He’s has seen just about everything else in his 15 years at Chapel Hill. He’s the most successful football coach in school history. In 2007, he led the Tigers to its first state playoff win since the mid-1960s, when the school was still on Franklin Street.
He even led Chapel Hill to a 2008 PAC-6 Championship in the Tigers final season as a 4A school.
When the National Football League commemorated the 50th Super Bowl in 2015, they sent gold footballs to all high schools that had a player participate in any of the previous 49 NFL Championship games.
Chapel Hill received one. Orange didn’t, but they should have.
In the early 1990s, when high school football received more coverage because newspapers were still a primary influence (the Durham Herald-Sun doesn’t even print a Saturday edition anymore), Chapel Hill-Orange was the biggest rivalry in Orange County by default. It was the only rivalry in Orange County since they were the only two high schools.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of coverage was focused on Northern Durham since the Knights had several state championship contenders at that time. What slipped through the cracks was that Orange and Chapel Hill often played excellent games featuring players who would go on to long, distinguished careers.
In 1990, Orange defeated Chapel Hill at Auman Stadium in Jermaine Lattie returned a fumble for a touchdown midway through the fourth quarter. On the field that night for Chapel Hill was Bernardo Harris, who would go on to play at UNC in the glory years of Mack Brown. Despite going undrafted, Harris would spend nine seasons in the NFL and play in Super Bowl 31 for the Green Bay Packers, who defeated New England 35-21 for Brett Farve’s only world championship.
On top of that, no less than three players who would go on to become instrumental parts of Appalachian State’s 1995 Southern Conference Championship team were on the field. At safety for Chapel Hill was Matt Stevens, a native of Michigan. After graduating from Boone, Stevens went on to eight-year NFL career that included a stop in New England in 2001. That year ended with a quarterback named Tom Brady leading the Patriots to its first World Championship over St. Louis.
Of course, for Orange there was quarterback/safety Scott Satterfield, who would start a long association with Appalachian the following year as the quarterback on head coach Jerry Moore’s scout team. 22 years later, he would become the Mountaineers’ head coach.
Tailback Damon Scott shared the backfield with Satterfield, both in Hillsborough and in Boone. Scott would become an FCS (then it was I-AA) All-American at Appalachian and graduate in 1997.
Two years later, Orange’s Alvis Whitted would have a memorable moment of his own against Chapel Hill–no matter how hard he tries to forget. On a rainy Monday night where the field was a quagmire of mud, Chapel Hill kicked off after a touchdown. Whitted, with his cleats digging in the mud, took the ball on a reverse and had the entire side of the field to himself. But the mud stopped him and Whitted slipped and fell at the Chapel Hill 1-yard line. On the next snap, quarterback Mark Pounds fumbled and Chapel Hill recovered, won the game and went on to the state playoffs in Bill Hodgin’s final year.
Whitted went on to play for the Oakland Raiders and played special teams in Super Bowl 37 against Tampa Bay. Yet Orange never got its gold football from Roger Goodell’s office four years ago. Perhaps the commissioner is a reader of the website and can correct this wrong.