It has been more than a decade since students and families spent Saturday afternoons thrilling to an inter-island high school tackle football game.

Outdoor bleachers were packed when the Central High School Caribs, in red and white uniforms, and the Charlotte Amalie High School Chickenhawks, in blue and gold, stood on opposite sides of the Central High field awaiting the coin toss.

Vernon Scipio, was is now deceased, was director of physical education for the Virgin Islands and was the man who introduced tackle football to the territory in 1967. Scipio kept it going until years of tough circumstances and funding cutbacks finally killed the program in 1987.

In the 1970s and early '80s, the Central-CAHS rivalry produced games that routinely drew as many as 1,000 fans. People would arrive by the truckloads, carrying coolers packed with food and iced drinks, and enthusiasm and excitement would build long before the game started.

Charlotte Amalie High School even had two teams in the early 1970s. The CAHS Gold team competed against Central and also played in a Puerto Rico league against teams from Ramy Air Force Base, Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, For Buchanan Army Base, Commonwealth Private School and Robinson Private School.

The CAHS Blue team played against squads on St. Thomas-Antilles School, All Saints, Sts. Peter and Paul and Eudora Kean.

High school football started on St. Thomas in 1964 with six-man flag teams. By 1967, the students' enthusiasm had propelled the league to eight-man squads in full-contact tackle games.

By 1974, interest was so high that CAHS, Central High and the newly built Ivanna Eudora Kean added regulation 11-man teams. The private schools soon fielded teams as well.

"We always went over there. It was cheap to travel back then," recalls Robert Massey, who was the Chickenhawks' offensive coach from 1972-87, and now is head tackle football coach at CAHS.

"We got some money from the government and paid $14 per player round-trip to go to Puerto Rico. We stayed at the YMCA for $5 a night."

Former Central High coach Willie King said the teams were on easy street back then. "The government purchased the equipment. The government also took care of insurance and travel expenses," he said. People's Guarantee Underwriters Inc., which continues to insure students at public schools today, covered the players.

Arthur Jamison, St. Thomas-St. John tackle football commissioner, was CAHS head coach in those days and recalls the era as golden years for Virgin Islands scholastic sports.

"Tackle football was the essence of the school year. It set the tone for everything else, from cheerleaders to the band to the basketball season."

Massey said, "Most of the games at CAHS field and Lionel Roberts Stadium were sellouts-the games between CAHS and Eudora Kean always were.

"I can remember the school band marching from the school to the stadium, leading the team. Tackle football was it," says Massey, recalling football's popularity in the '70s.

Games even attracted the attention of higher powers. "The first time Sts. Peter and Paul beat CAHS, the Catholic nuns and priests at the school declared the following Monday a holiday," said Buddy Kennings, who played for CAHS in the tackle heyday and now hosts Radio One Sports and serves as flag football league commissioner and an IAA referee.

By the late 1980s, however, tackle football was a memory. All that remained were rotting bleachers and the ghostly uprights of the goalposts on overgrown fields.

Willie King, who coached the Caribs for two seasons, 1971 and 1972, recalls that the Education Department realized by the 1980s that it just could not meet the rising costs of inter-island travel expenses.

The cost of travelling to Puerto Rico increased to nearly $60 per person in the early '80s, but, Massey said, "the kids wanted to play so badly that they paid their own way."

Even so, they had fewer and fewer chances to play. Military bases on Puerto Rico, which once brought thousands of mainland U.S. students to the island, began to close as the United States downsized its post-Cold War military force. By 1986 there were not enough students to warrant a tackle football league on Puerto Rico.

The base closings left Puerto Rico's economy hard-pressed, and the public schools were unable to cover the cost of fielding regulation teams.

The final blow came with the advent of academic standards for athletes. In 1984, a number of Eudora Kean's football players failed to meet the scholastic requirements for student athletes, and the team had to disband and leave the league.

Deputy Superintendent William Frett, who was principal of Eudora Kean at the time, said he had no choice. "If they had played, we might have had to forfeit any wins."

On Nov. 14, 1987, the Blue Waves-a pick-up team of Puerto Rican public high school players that formed outside of the financially strapped schools-came to St. Thomas to play the Chickenhawks at CAHS field.

It would be the last tackle football game played on St. Thomas for 12 years.

King said tackle football's potential as a gateway to college did not sway Education officials, who simply refused to put money into the sport.

V.I. players yearning for the fun of football had to settle for the non-contact version-flag football-which does not require expensive equipment.

From the moment that last whistle blew, there was talk about reviving tackle football. But for a decade, talk was all there was.

In 1995, and again in 1998, the Education Department and the St. Thomas-St. John IAA met and looked into what it would take to field tackle football teams at the high schools. Every time, the question came down to money. It would take a lot, and the school system simply did not have enough.

"Dr. Turnbull cut us off when he was commissioner," King said, referring to Gov. Charles Turnbull, who was the Education commissioner from 1979 to 1987.

"It was during his administration that he said we no longer had money for travel-period!"

But last year, Brett Tiettleman, a physical education teacher at the new Educational Complex high school, put St. Croix back in action. The Florida native wanted to revive a sport that was "huge" in his hometown.

Gregory Tyler, who is president of the St. Croix Interscholastic Athletic Association, said Tiettleman, who since has relocated to New Jersey, "had this vision: He wanted to reinstate tackle football so he tried a lot of angles."

Tyler, a counselor at Central High and the Caribs' assistant coach, said Tiettleman wrote a lot of letters asking for help.

The Anti-Litter Commission provided grants for clean-up of area, and that gave Tiettleman a fund-raising idea.

He got would-be players to clean up areas in St. Croix for the grant funds. He also held a summer camp and used athletes from both private and public schools to staff it for free.

Tiettleman asked the Virgin Islands Telephone Corp. for funding and got it.

"Vitelco sponsored 30 sets of full uniforms for each school and the sponsorship was on every team's jersey for the 1998 season," Tyler said.

"To outfit one player, we're talking between $600 to $800 dollars and that's not including the shoes."

Players paid for their shoes, socks and mouthpiece, which ran them a total of $120, said Tyler.

Tiettleman took responsibility for purchasing and distributing uniforms to the students, but for some time, it was like getting new Sunday clothes with no church service to attend.

Educational Complex was the only schools with enough players on its team to organize scrimmages among themselves. Thus, when it was time for interscholastic competition, the Barracudas easily routed their opponents and consequently were crowned "league champions."

Still, many labeled the program a success and marveled at the team that had persevered with just two coaches, little money and a grassy field that often had to be mowed and marked by students just before game day.

The shortcomings of the first St. Croix season went mostly unnoticed on St. Thomas, where fans and athletes enthusiastically envisioned inter-island competition. Football fever ran so high that a first-time candidate for the Senate, Donald "Ducks" Cole, built his campaign on the pledge that if elected, he would revive tackle football on St. Thomas.

That was what people wanted to hear, and Cole won.

Even before the Legislature's swearing-in in January, Cole had started his drive to find funding, organize people and make the dream come true.

He found the money in the same place that St. Croix had found it: Vitelco.

Cole went to a sports expo in Atlanta, ordered the inventory and made a variety of arrangements to have it delivered, some of which went even awry before the season got under way.

St. Thomas coaches and supporters met and developed a concept for a three-team league like the one on St. Croix: one team for each of the two public high schools and one that comprised players from the private high schools.

Little was left to do, it seemed. The equipment was supposed to be on the way and the schedule was set.

On Sept. 1, Cole arrived at CAHS with a truckload of uniforms, pads and helmets and handed them out in a ceremony that cheered the spirits of all who had waited so long for the sport to return.

The ceremony, however, turned out to be not the end but the beginning of Cole's drive to restore the sport.

Insurance, league supervision, scheduling and facilities suddenly became problems with no clear solution.

The opening kickoff was to be Sept. 23. Six weeks later, the St. Thomas teams still had played, some of the equipment had not arrived and the insurance coverage for the players had not been clarified.

By the end of December, St. Thomas had managed to play six games in season characterized by fumbled planning, fumbled execution and fumbled communication.

The St. Thomas teams had practiced since early spring, trying to build skills that many of them hoped would attract the notice of colleges.

By the time the first St. Thomas game was played, many college recruiters had already made their choices-from among players at schools with predictable schedules and regulation games and facilities.

On St. Croix, Tyler said that if nothing else, "football ought to be a huge priority in Education for what it can mean to the student athlete:

"It's a scholarship."