Chariho and Exeter/West Greenwich play on Thanksgiving Day, 2003.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

RICHMOND -- He has been the Chariho High athletic director for 12 years, but Todd Grimes still has memories of the Thanksgiving Day football games he attended back when he was a Chariho student in the mid-1980s.

The only problem was, Grimes had to borrow his memories from Westerly.

"Chariho didn't have a football team when I was a student here, so every Thanksgiving I went to the Westerly-Stonington game," Grimes said with a laugh.

But now, in Grimes words, "We have some memories."

Thursday morning the football teams from Chariho and Exeter/West Greenwich high schools will stage the 13th renewal of their Thanksgiving Day rivalry.

As Rhode Island Thanksgiving Day high school football rivalries go, Chariho-EWG is still in its infancy.

Westerly has been playing its Connecticut neighbor, Stonington, for about 100 years. Thursday morning at Pierce Field in East Providence, La Salle and East Providence will meet for the 80th time. In Warwick, Pilgrim and Warwick Vets will stage the 46th edition of their intra-city holiday showdown, and in Cranston the city's two high schools, East and West, will meet for the 38th time.

Yet, if the original concept behind Thanksgiving was to bring people together who were neighbors, but didn't really know each other, Chariho-Exeter/West Greenwich may be the personification of a Thanksgiving Day rivalry.

They are two schools from neighboring, rural New England school districts who shared a multitude of similarities, but whose residents don't have many opportunities to share their experiences.

"Our school districts are next to each other, but I don't know these guys," Exeter-West Greenwich football player Fred Seymour said Monday night as he sat across a table from Zach Edwards, Adam Straight and Antonio Asermelly, the tri-captains of this year's Chariho football team.

"We go to school out here in the woods. There are no places where everybody gets together like there are in the city," Seymour continued.

"Our districts are so big; I live 15 miles from these guys," Seymour added as he pointed to Zach Hornoff and Joe Ferle, two of his Exeter/West Greenwich teammates.

It's the natural Thanksgiving Day rivalry that didn't come into being until the mid-1990s, because for decades the people of Richmond, Hopkinton and Charlestown had a high school but no football team, while the people of Exeter and West Greenwich didn't even have a high school.

But in 1990 the new Exeter/West Greenwich High School opened, and the following year the Scarlet Knights started playing football. They had played football at Chariho when the school first opened in the early '60s, but within a few years the program was abandoned for lack of participation. For three decades there was no football at Chariho.

Finally, in 1996, they started playing football at Chariho again, and a Thanksgiving rivalry was born.

You can't fast-track rivalries. They are built over time. But you can cultivate them, which is why Grimes brought the captains and coaches of the two teams together Monday night.

"We don't have many people who have grown up with this rivalry, so we thought it would be nice to bring the captains together so they could understand who they are playing and what this game is all about," said Grimes.

So they sat eating meatballs and pasta, and talking about memories, aspirations and why they are thankful for where they will be Thursday morning.

Seymour talked about how he is thankful that his mother raised him and his older sisters as a single mom, creating the situation where he could play high school football and think about going to college to study engineering.

Straight talked about his parents being at all his games through the years, and always making him feel like he was a winner regardless of what the scoreboard read.

For about 90 minutes, they talked about family and football and how, on this day, the two are intertwined.

"I grew up watching my older brothers playing for Chariho in this game," said Asermelly. "When I was a little kid going to the Thanksgiving Day game, I remember thinking, 'Someday I will be playing in this game.' Now it's my senior year. This is the last one."

One final Thanksgiving morning of touchdowns, tackles and lifelong memories.

jgillool@projo.com