NEWPORT — Once they were the giants of Rhode Island high school football, winning 10 state titles from 1973 to 1990, this school that’s been playing high school football now for over 100 years.

They were the Rogers High School Vikings and they were the gold standard, complete with Friday night lights at Freebody Park, the site of the original Newport jazz and folk festivals, and the sense that Rogers football was as much a part of this beautiful old city as the mansions on Bellevue Avenue and the summer tourists on Thames Street.

No more.

That’s all in the past now, as gone as the America’s Cup.

Now the football names in the state are La Salle and East Providence, Barrington and Hendricken, even Portsmouth, which once upon a time would have been considered little more than Rogers’ jayvee team.

So what happened?

My interest had started two weeks ago when I wrote in a Saturday notes column of Rogers’ football demise, and received several thoughtful e-mails giving reasons why.

One was from Anne Galvin, who graduated from Rogers in 1975 when there were 400 kids in her graduation class, as compared to 106 in her son’s graduating class last year. She has two kids who played football at Rogers, and had great experiences, but believes the school is simply too small now to have success in Division I.

Another was from Bill Nimmo, who played against Rogers in the late ’60s, back when he says Rogers’ offensive line averaged nearly 260 pounds. In his view, the demise of Rogers football goes back to the changes in Newport going back 25 years or so, the advent of more low-income housing and changing demographics.

“I can’t blame them,” he wrote of the people who have moved into the city in the past couple of decades, changing it. “I’d take the beach over pavement every day.”

But he added that one of the legacies were racial problems inside Rogers that had never been there before, and white flight out of Newport and its high tax rate into places like Portsmouth.

“The city that everyone moved to on the north end of the island?” Nimmo wrote. “It was Portsmouth. And the rest is pleasant history for Portsmouth football.”

And one e-mail was from Frank Newsome, the Rogers football coach, who played at Rogers for famed coach John Toppa, and quarterbacked Rogers’ last state title in 1990.

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“What happened?” he asked rhetorically. “The middle-class family left Newport.”

He was sitting in the athletic director’s office, a cramped office which speaks of too little space.

Once upon a time Rogers High School had been a showcase, all glass and modern layout, a school that spoke to the future. Now it just looks old, more than 50 years old, more about the past than the future, a metaphor for its football program.

Rogers is now classified as an “urban school,” so in many ways the struggles of Rogers football is more about sociology than it is about football, more about a changing city than it is about coaching, more about Newport than it is about Rogers.

There’s little question that Newport is a different city than it was 20 years ago, with apartment buildings that have become condos, with out-of-staters who own property, with summer people that have no interest in the school system, the side of tourism that doesn’t get touted in the promotional brochures. If the old line about Newport always was the rich, the poor, and the Navy, now the Navy’s gone and the middle class went with it.

And not without ramifications.

“There was no Pop Warner football for about 10 years,” Newsome said, “and even now it’s sputtering. So we have too many kids who have never played football before. Football used to be the thing in Newport, but now that’s different.”

“How?” he is asked.

“Less crowds,” he said. “Less family involvement. Less support. And not enough dads.”

All the signs of a program in decline.

Newsome has been coaching at Rogers for 11 years now, in his sixth as the head coach. He was the local kid who came back home to coach, the kid who had lived through the great times, those times when to walk down the street in your Rogers football jersey was a source of great pride, a visible reminder that you were part of something great, something that went out over the bridges of Aquidneck Island like some civic testimonial.

And now he deals with a different reality, the acknowledgment that when the Interscholastic League realigns next year than Rogers will undoubtedly be going down to a different level, that the days of trying to win the Division state title in football are over.

He deals with the reality that virtually every year you can go down the list of the Portsmouth football roster and see the names of kids whose fathers once played football for Rogers, kids who now play in what is referred to in Newport as “Newport North.”

Newsome also deals with the challenge of trying to keep a team motivated when it’s 3-7, and hasn’t had a winning season in four years, trying to keep his kids motivated in this toughest of sports, this game that’s hard to play no matter what your record is, this game that always exacts its pound of flesh, even in the good times.

“Not everyone can do this,” he said.

So he preaches resilience in this era when everyone expects a trophy, preaches the rewards that come with being on a team, for he knows how much the lessons of sport once changed his life. Lessons he now tries to pass down to another generation of Rogers football players who now play on different terrain, the glory days gone, their opponents as much sociology and a changing city as the teams they play against.

breynold@projo.com