Look at the most successful high school football teams around, and you’ll find both talent and depth.

Stearns High School in Millinocket has a rich football tradition, but a dramatic drop in enrollment in recent years is testing the depth of the Minutemen’s football program.

Just 15 players turned out for the opening day of practice last week, and while that number had increased to 21 as the Minutemen readied for a controlled scrimmage against Mount Desert Island on Monday, building the numbers remains a work in progress.

“We’re working on it,” said Stearns coach Chris Preble, whose team has cancelled its preseason exhibition game against Winthrop originally scheduled for Saturday. “The kids are going around, and the coaches have been going around since the first day of practice looking for kids who want to play football.”

The primary challenging facing the players and coaches face in their recruiting efforts is the pool of student-athletes available to draw from at the high school level. Preble estimates there will be around 240 students at Stearns when classes begin last week.

The low numbers have required some changes in Preble’s approach to preseason practice, though other changes have been prompted by Maine Principals’ Association guidelines that regulated the amount of contact allowed during the first week of practice.

Under those guidelines, no contact was allowed during the first two days of practice and only contact above the waist was allowed during the third and fourth days. Full contact was allowed for the first time last Friday, and the first scrimmages were pushed back until after 4 p.m. this Monday.

“But we’re still coaching football,” said Preble, “and doing what we need to do to prepare for the season.”

Low football numbers aren’t a new problem at Stearns. Last year’s team ended its season with 24 players, though just five graduated from that squad.

“We didn’t graduate a lot of kids,” said Preble, “so most of the ones we have are familiar with what we’re going to do.”

One glaring statistic within the makeup of this year’s team is the presence of just one junior on the roster.

There is a bit of longer-term hope,” Preble said, as 18 eighth-graders are signed up for middle school football along with eight or nine seventh-graders. He added that another challenge will be to keep those younger players interested in football once they get to high school, given that there presently are no sub-varsity teams at Stearns.

“You can’t blame the kids that are playing,” Preble said. “They’re working hard.”

Witches getting in gear

Slowly but surely, the Brewer High football team is being outfitted for the 2006 season.

Fitting players with helmets and pads normally is a formality, but Brewer’s situation was complicated after last season when the team’s helmets and shoulder pads were stolen from a trailer after being picked up by Lewiston-based Northeast Athletics for postseason cleaning. The equipment was subsequently found floating in the Androscoggin River.

The trailer contained equipment, mostly pads and helmets, but also some jerseys, from Brewer High School, Brewer Middle School, Husson College of Bangor, Orono High School, Reeds Brook Middle School in Hampden, Hampden Academy and others

Getting replacement equipment has been a slow process, said Brewer football coach Don Farnham.

This year’s varsity squad finally received its helmets last Wednesday and shoulder pads a day later, after practices were already under way.

The school’s freshman team received its helmets and shoulder pads on Tuesday night.

“The kids have been great about it,” said Farnham. “It’s been kind of frustrating, but we got a lot of teaching done last week, and that’s important for us because we’ve got 50 players and 25 of them are sophomores.”