High School Sports: Football

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 11, 2005

NEWPORT -- He knows it probably will never be like it was when he was playing football for Rogers High.

Like the time a Newport elementary school teacher asked her students to bring in newspaper articles for a current events project and there ended up being more articles about Frank Newsome than George H.W. Bush, who was president at the time.

It was 1990 and Newsome was the quarterback of the Rogers football team. Back then being the Rogers quarterback was the most high-profile high school sports position in Rhode Island.

Legendary coach John Toppa had developed Rogers football into a Rhode Island sports dynasty. From 1973 to 1990 the Vikings won 10 Division I state championships. Rogers played in every Division I Super Bowl from 1985 to 1990.

In 1990 Newsome quarterbacked the Vikings to the state title as he passed for 17 touchdowns and scored 14 in only 10 games. He was more than just a football player. In his senior year he earned first-team All-State honors in football, basketball and baseball. In the previous 58 years of R.I. Interscholastic League competition, only three other athletes had been known to earned first-team All-State honors in those three sports in the same school year.

But while he was a superb all-around athlete, it was being a Rogers football player that gave Newsome -- and his Vikings football teammates -- special status on the streets of Newport.

"Mr. Toppa would tell us right off the bat that being a Rogers football player anointed you to a different status. When you walked around this community you represented him. So when you walked the streets you thought about stuff like that," said Newsome, who now is the Rogers head football coach.

But Rogers football began a decline in the early '90s. That 1990 title game was the Vikings last appearance in Super Bowl. Over the past 14 years, there have been far more losing seasons than winning campaigns. Toppa retired after the 1990 season, but it was more than just the loss of a legendary coach that sent Rogers football fortunes into a tailspin.

The city of Newport has changed over the past 15 years. Newport has always been a city of more than mansions and sailboats. It has always been a city with a diverse population, a city with low-income housing as well as mansions and waterfront condos. For generations it also was a city with a strong middle class. It was that middle class that produced many of the Rogers' highly successful high school athletes in the decades of the '50s through the '80s.

The mansions are still on Bellevue Avenue and they still play tennis on the grass every summer at the Hall of Fame, but the soul of the city has undergone a transformation.

"The middle class is definitely disappearing in Newport," said Newsome, who came to Newport from Brooklyn with his divorced mother and younger brother when he was 6.

"The population of Rogers has changed, probably more in the middle class than any other segment," Newsome continued. "Some middle-class and upper-middle-class families moved to Portsmouth or Middletown. Now with the raising cost of housing, new families can't afford to move in."

The change in demographics has affected the city's high school. Rogers never was a big school, even by Rhode Island standards. When Newsome played for the Vikings, there were between 550 and 600 boys in the school. That ranked Rogers near the midpoint of male enrollment for the state's high schools. But over the past decade, the school's enrollment has declined. Now, according to last year's Interscholastic League enrollment figures, there are only 409 boys at Rogers.

That makes Rogers the smallest of the eight public schools playing Division I football. The Vikings are playing against schools such as East Providence and Hendricken that have 1,059 and 1,040 boys, respectively.

Rogers isn't just small by Division I standards. Only 4 of the 37 football-playing public high schools in the state have fewer students than Rogers. Three of those schools Exeter-West Greenwich, North Smithfield and Narragansett play in Division IV. The other school, East Greenwich, plays in Division III.

Newsome knows all about the numbers, but he thinks they can still can add up to a winning football program at Rogers.

"I know we're smaller now than when I was here. We may not have the depth we once had, but there still are a lot of good athletes here. We just need to get them to come out," said Newsome. "We don't focus on the enrollment of the other schools, just on the 11 players on the field."

He's now in his second year as the Vikings head football coach. Afte graduating from Rogers, he went to Eckard College in Florida on a baseball scholarship and enjoyed a solid career at the Division II baseball power.

After graduation, he returned to Rhode Island and began working in a Newport social-services agency. A few years later, veteran Rogers basketball coach Jim Psaras convinced him to become an assistant basketball coach.

"I hadn't really thought about coaching, but then coach Psaras got me involved and I really liked it," said Newsome, who also joined the Rogers faculty a few years ago.

It's probably not surprising that once he decided to coach, Newsome began spending time on the football field as well as the basketball court. Five years ago he was named a Rogers assistant football coach. Last year, he was named the head coach.

His appointment came just as the Interscholastic League was making four-year realignments in all sports. Rogers could have requested to be moved to a lower division and league officials would have likely granted it. But Newsome and school officials opted to continue playing at the top level of Rhode Island high school football.

"We probably could have gone down, but we think we can compete here and if you can compete against the best, you should do it," said Newsome.

He doesn't show his players his scrapbooks. He doesn't continually lecture about the glory days of Rogers football. But he's constantly preaching the satisfaction of beating the odds.

"We try to give them a piece of the past, but we never want to compare," said Newsome.

"I tell these guys the linemen on my teams were no bigger than these guys. It was just hard-work and determination. We had 170-pound linemen that line-up against big guys. Now we have the same thing. It's just back then, the expectations were different. We expected to win."

He knows some of today's teenagers have different priorities than he and his Rogers teammates did.

"In my day, boys didn't really care about their shoes matching their shirt," said Newsome. "You had one pair of sneakers you wore to school and that was the way it was. Now more kids are concerned about fashion so that's what they want to do with their time. They work so they have the money to buy the shoes and clothes. In this city it's easy for a kid to find a good-paying job."

"There are some kids who have to work to help pay family bills. You know that and you make concessions. But there some who are just concern with fashion. That's the kind of stuff that's in front of us. But we'll get around it," said Newsome.

Somehow he'll make wearing a Rogers football shirt the best fashion statement a Newport teenage boy can make.