[5/25/04]After more than a century of football, five years of discussion, and two straight winless seasons, Chamberlain-Hunt Academy has decided to put its Wildcats to sleep.

Citing a changing mission for the military boarding school, CHA officials have suspended the football program for at least the next two years. CHA will still have an intramural football program, which begins play in January, and its coaches will remain on the school’s staff, but no interscholastic sports will be played during the fall season until at least 2006.

The decision is based on the Port Gibson institution’s mission as a military boarding school, which requires strict discipline and little outside contact for cadets during the first 30 days of the school year, officials said.

“Basically, it’s because we were having a hard time fitting it into the school year with our school structure,” Chamberlain-Hunt athletic director David Granville said. “We just don’t have enough in-house leadership developed in the first month.”

Some local CHA supporters were angry with the decision. They feel it’s a slap in the face to them after years of sending children and money to the school.

“They just made the school go in a direction that is not very attractive,” said Port Gibson attorney Melvin McFatter, whose son, Daniel, graduated from CHA in 2002. “It’s real sad. It’s going the way they want it to go, and if you judge it by their criteria it’s very successful. But it’s not a help at all to the local community.”

Chamberlain-Hunt was founded in 1879 and moved to its current campus in 1900. In 1892 it fielded its first football team, which played college teams like Ole Miss as well as other boarding schools around the South. Eventually, Chamberlain-Hunt joined the Mississippi Private Schools Association.

The financially troubled school was on the brink of closing its doors in the late 1990s when it was bought by French Camp Academy. Not long after, the mission and the atmosphere at CHA began to change.

A bigger emphasis was put on the military aspect of the school and its boarding students. Money and physical improvements poured in, but local day students felt squeezed out. Many of them transferred to schools in Vicksburg or Natchez.

“In a lot of ways, we just didn’t like the way they were beginning to run things, and obviously athletics were declining,” said Allen Cassell, a former Chamberlain-Hunt student who transferred to Porters Chapel Academy in 2002. “Some people had other, smaller reasons (to transfer) but that was about it for everybody.”

Ironically, CHA’s enrollment has gone up in the last five years. But only one member of this year’s graduating class, Byron May, was a day student. Two day students are scheduled to graduate next year.

Despite the drop in the number of day students, Granville denied that the school was pushing them away.

“That’s not the case, but when you’re a person impacted by it, I can see it,” he said. “The board of directors is not doing anything to get rid of day students.”

Granville said the lower number of day students did contribute to the demise of the football program, though. Boarding students only stay at CHA for one or two years on average, making it hard to build consistency in the program.

Only five players from the 2002 football team were on the 2003 roster. The 2002 team did have 11 seniors, but the program had already begun to fade.

The Wildcats have not won a game since 2001, and finished last season on a 20-game losing streak. Last season, CHA went 0-10, was held to six points or less in all but one game, and was outscored 453-38. During the losing streak, Chamberlain-Hunt scored only 96 points.

“Our biggest drawback, besides not having a lot of players, is playing against players who have been together since the fourth, fifth, or sixth grade. It’s hard to compete against teams like that,” Granville said, adding that the losing streak had nothing to do with the decision to drop football. “The timing makes it look like that, but it is something that has been discussed for a long time.”

The decision had more to do with the school’s new mission, officials said. During the first month of school, new cadets are indoctrinated into a tough military-style curriculum. Having a chance to meet friends and parents outside the academy undermines that curriculum, commandant Shane Blanton wrote in a recent magazine article.

“Games, both home and away, provide contact with parents and friends during the crucial first 30 days of school,” Blanton wrote in the March edition of the school magazine. “Such contact often fuels homesickness and provides opportunities for cadets to manipulate parents and to obtain contraband from friends, all of which undermine the Academy’s abilities to accomplish its mission.

“Being relieved of these concerns, CHA can focus on creating and maintaining a consistent military structure, which sets the stage for cadets to grow for the rest of the year.”

McFatter understood the changing mission, but wasn’t happy with it. He feels it has changed CHA from a local school to one that just happens to be in Port Gibson.

“It’s basically French Camp that runs Chamberlain-Hunt, and they have their idea about everything,” he said. “They have no sense of the community here in Claiborne County.”