North Carolina Football Association (NCFA)

Oh, the Herald is completely in the tank for the Popes -- the newspaper
publisher owns the team, and Brett is the sports editor. Several of the guys
on the team work in various capacities for the newspaper.

Brett moved to North Carolina in 2000 to take the sports-editor job with the
Herald (replacing Ellis, who had retired), and then he started playing for
the Popes as sort of a George Plimpton deal. He continued to write columns
about Popes' games until the Salisbury loss to Burlington during this
regular season. The following morning, he wrote a column announcing that he
would no longer be writing about the NCFA -- and that Ellis would be taking
over the sidebar columns.

This was quite a treat for longtime Herald readers. Ellis, a Salisbury
native, had been with the newspaper for 54 years, since he was 16. His first
job with the Herald was volunteering game stories for the first of
Salisbury's semi-pro football teams that preceded the NCFA's Popes: the
Salisbury Colonels. His dad played end for the team, which he owned with a
bunch of other fellas just home from the war. The Colonels played
sporadically until the mid 1950s, usually against other semi-pro teams from
North Carolina. One notable exception was a 9 p.m. Dec. 31, 1948, kickoff at
a municipal park in New Orleans against another semi-pro team, from Ada,
Okla. It drew about 100 fans, probably 60 of them University of North
Carolina students whom Ellis had personally invited. They were in New
Orleans for the Jan. 1, 1949, Sugar Bowl pitting Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice
and UNC against the University of Oklahoma.

Ellis wrote about the Salisbury Blues, a semi-pro outfit that played in
various leagues throughout the 1960s and '70s. When it appeared that team
would go defunct, members of the old Colonels revived (and renamed) the
flagging franchise. The new Colonels played in the Mason-Dixon, Atlantic
Coast and Mid-Atlantic Football Leagues until 1991, and Ellis wrote about
those games, too.

---

The Salisbury Herald was purchased in 1997 by The Weigel Group, a
Michigan-based chain of mostly small newspapers in the South. Trace Weigel
was installed as publisher/editor-in-chief. Weigel had studied journalism
and played defensive back at Indiana University in the mid 1960s. Weigel
eschewed the family publishing business, focusing instead on playing
semi-pro football throughout the United States. He even got a two tryout
with Canadian Football League teams and one with the NFL's Miami Dolphins in
1968 (where he became enamored with the writing of Edwin Pope, a writer for
The Miami Herald). Weigel finally gave up his football playing at age 37 and
spent the rest of the 1980s writing and editing for and then much of the
1990s managing his family's newspapers. It wasn't until after he moved to
Salisbury in 1997 that Weigel learned that the National Sportswriters and
Sportscasters Association was based in the town and that Pope was its
president.

In 1998, when Ellis mentioned in a column that a new semi-pro North Carolina
Football Association was being launched by owners of existing teams in
Burlington and Wilson (and wondered whether the old Colonels might be
reconstituted for the new league), Weigel moved quickly to buy the assets of
the old Colonels (35 navy-blue uniforms, 33 navy-blue helmets, four
cheerleaders' sweaters, three pom-poms, two blocking dummies and six
footballs, all finally located in a storage facility outside of town). He
dubbed his team the "Popes," after the sports writer, and especially
encouraged six players to sign up for the league's first draft:

-- Sean Brooks, the Colonels' last starting quarterback and local landscape
architect;

-- three former teammates at Livingstone College, quarterback Bo Graffe
(operator of a mobile pet-grooming business), halfback Roger Dickens (the
current local Boys' Club administrator and a U.S. Army reservist) and wide
receiver Howie Morris (now a member of Livingstone's sociology faculty);

-- the Rev. Sam Franklin, a bruising all-state runner for the Salisbury High
School Hornets in the 1980s and now the senior minister at a local Baptist
church;

-- Chris "Fatty" Aplin, Franklin's top blocker a Salisbury High and then a
second-team all-ACC University of North Carolina defensive lineman who had
swelled to 340 pounds since his football career ended and he had bought a
western Rowan County farm with his middle-school-sweetheart-turned-wife,
Patty.

Weigel got all but Franklin, initially.

---

Ellis retired from the newspaper in 2000, against the advice of friends who
worried that he was upsetting his routine too soon after his wife's death.
He helped Weigel in choosing Brett's resume for the job.

The NCFA launched in 2000, and Weigel and others encouraged Brett to try out
for the Popes as an undrafted free agent and write about his experiences.
Brett loved it, and, though he wasn't very good (he had never played
football in high school or college), he understood enough of what was going
on to be useful as an inactive practice player. He was thrilled to be a
rookie semi-professional linebacker at age 32.

By 2001, Brett had improved enough to join the active roster, as a backup
and special-teams player. Ellis came back to the newspaper part-time, to
provide relief to both Brett and Weigel, who were becoming increasingly busy
with their football hobby. Ellis would be willing to handle some of the desk
work (he liked the computers) and write editorial-page columns and stories
about local college women's basketball.

This was the arrangement through 2002, and it was a pretty happy situation.
The Popes made (but lost) each of the first three NCFA title games. With the
team winning (and the newspaper willing to provide year-around, almost
daily, NFL-level coverage of a semi-pro football team), Weigel's team owned
Salisbury. Ellis enjoyed being back to work. And Brett's stock was rising as
a player. In the 2002 season, at 34, he had joined the Popes' first-string
defense and earned honorable-mention All-NCFA honors.