Football, as much as anything, illustrates the resiliency of the Cajuns here and the challenge of maintaining a lifestyle dependent on the bounty and vagary of nature. It is a place where shrimp can be bought straight off the boat and blue-jeaned men work in oil and gas, and egrets and brown pelicans nest along the narrow roads that serve as nature trails and evacuation routes.  As recently as 1996, South Cameron High reached the state championship game. Before Rita, 70 or 80 players filled out the roster each season, stretching down the sideline like a marching band. But the high school has since lost more than half its enrollment. Its 98 students are the third fewest among Louisiana schools that play football. Only 23 players suited up Thursday as the Tarpons lost their eighth game in eight weeks without a victory.  “They tell us not to use the hurricanes as an excuse, but we just don’t have the numbers,” said Brendan Trahan, 17, a senior center and defensive tackle.  The new school feels oddly empty even with kindergarten through 12th grade housed in one building, so few students that everyone gets a locker on the top row. School is held four days a week, from 7:45 a.m. to 4 p.m., to entice teachers to commute from nearby towns and to help parents save gas money. Trahan, a straight-A student, has six classmates in his advanced math class. That is six more than in physics, where it is just he and the teacher.  “You set the curve in there?” Ginger Boudreaux, his math teacher, joked before Thursday’s game.  “Top of my class,” Trahan said.  He was in seventh grade when Rita struck, gutting the local schools, stripping metal buildings to their skeletons, scouring churches of everything but the kneelers on the pews. Trahan and his family evacuated eastward, to the other side of Baton Rouge, but he was desperate to return home, for football, for everything a kid could do outdoors with a shotgun and fishing pole.  “You can go where you want; I’m going home,” he told his mother, a teacher. “It’s 5 minutes from my duck blind, 5 minutes from my deer stand, 10 minutes from anyplace I want to go fishing. And I don’t want to be anything but a Tarpon.”  There was not much to return to. Stands on the visitors’ side of the field disappeared in the storm. A state runner-up trophy from 1986, dented and rusted, was fished out of the marsh.  “They found one helmet 40 miles away,” Trahan said. “In a tree, I think.”  South Cameron played an abbreviated 2005 season at a borrowed field, using borrowed equipment, 45 minutes north in Lake Charles. As nomadic as herdsmen, the Tarpons played home games in Lake Charles again in 2006 and in 2008 after Ike, when players bused to practice every day after class at a bingo hall.  Somehow, South Cameron remained a playoff team, but all the interruption, the uncertainty, the temporary fields and temporary classrooms took their toll. Parry LaLande, the head coach for 28 years including those state runner-up seasons in 1986 and 1996, retired after the 2009 season, in part weary from the hurricanes.  “I don’t mind getting beat; I just want an equal chance,” LaLande said. “Teams didn’t beat us, Rita and Ike beat us.”  This season, a kind of posttraumatic stress caught up with South Cameron football. It seemed inevitable. As many as 7,000 of the 10,000 previous residents of Cameron Parish have returned, according to Tina Horn, the parish administrator. But only about half of the coastal residents are back on homesteads where many lived for generations on inherited land.  Former residents feel thwarted, parish officials said, by the new requirements of building codes and flood insurance, and are unable or unwilling to pay costs that can reach $30,000 to $80,000 to elevate their homes 12 to 19 feet above sea level on pilings or mounds of dirt. Mole hills, the mounds are called here in the flat countryside.  “The ones who should be back, the elderly who have lived their whole lives here, many can’t come back because they can’t afford elevators,” said Theos Duhon, the sheriff of Cameron Parish.  The parish courthouse still stands as a defiant bulwark against three destructive hurricanes. The community hospital is back up and running. Fishing camps and residential homes stand high, as if on giraffe’s legs. But football is struggling to its feet. Only now does the team have a weight room for the first time in five years.  “We have no muscle on our kids,” said Sethie Trosclair, South Cameron’s assistant principal. “We had meat on our line pre-Rita.”  Cameron Parish’s population has shifted inland, toward slightly higher and presumably safer ground. Some, including LaLande, the former coach, favored a consolidation with nearby Grand Lake High, arguing that it would save money, allow for a broader range of classes to be taught and provide a reliable stream of athletes.  “We built something down there,” LaLande said. “I hate to see everything washed away by two hurricanes. I fear it will.”  The school board did not seriously consider a merger, said Stephanie Rodrigue, the superintendent of Cameron Parish. Instead, a counterargument prevailed, that a community’s lifeblood flows from its schools and churches. A loss of those means a loss of identity. And anyway, few places are entirely safe from virulent nature, whether it be earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes.  “We can leave ahead of a hurricane; you can’t leave ahead of a tornado,” Rodrigue said.  Now that South Cameron High has been rebuilt, the school is attempting to reconstruct its football team. Local competition will arrive in 2013, when Grand Lake plans to begin fielding a varsity squad. It seems inconceivable to many that football would end at South Cameron, but sustainability depends on students. There are only 10 children in second grade, 13 in third grade, 18 in fifth grade.  “It’s a good, hard question,” said Steve Barnett, South Cameron’s athletic director and offensive line coach. “Our numbers are so low. We’ve got a beautiful school but no kids in it.”  James Marcantel, in his first season as South Cameron’s head coach, plans to begin a junior high team that will prepare players for the varsity. A soft-spoken man, he is shepherding his players with encouragement instead of criticism.  Thursday’s game against Oberlin High, a state power, did not end in victory, but not in humiliation, either. The Tarpons played relentlessly and after the 38-6 defeat, Marcantel told his team: “There’s nothing to hang your head about. They were just a better team. One day, we’ll be the better team.”  Brandon Leboeuf, a seventh-grade water boy, said he hoped for a victory in one of the final two road games, “so I can pour some cold water on our coach’s head.”  Leaving the field, Trahan showed where an alligator had sauntered into the gym during the flooding from Ike. “Somebody came to get their stuff, and it was waiting,” he said with a laugh.  His senior season had not gone as planned, but for him, it had been the right decision to return after the hurricanes.  “I wouldn’t change a thing,” Trahan said. “Except maybe a few wins.”  A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2010, on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Storms’ Wake, And Still Standing. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Successive hurricanes have wrecked the landscape and driven away people, but they still play football at South Cameron High School in Louisiana.