Sorry I'm late to the conversation-- "busy summer" would be a gross understatement!
I agree with everyone's assessment above about the non-viability of Metro football. With Hampton Christian folding their football program this year (HC Terry Harris picked up an assistant's job at HRA), that leaves four football schools and two of them have long-standing relationships with the VCC which they aren't about to give up. The willingness of Broadwater to play Fuqua (400 mile round-trip!!!) gives you a sense of what these rivalries mean to these teams. The other thing is that most of the A.D.s in the Metro Conference (the ones who don't play football) don't want their schools to get involved in football. It's always been a soccer-centered conference and unless your enrollment is at the level of an Atlantic Shores or other TCIS-sized schools, it's tough to sustain both football and boys soccer in the fall.
Also, I think I remember finding some news articles on the Atlantic Shores bid to join the VCC. It was, I think, in the 1994-95 school year and was mostly basketball-focused. Shores won their only state championship in basketball in 1993, then left the Metro to run with Ryan Academy, Coastal Christian, Teagle Christian, and their ilk. A year of that was enough and they realized filling schedules (especially for non-basketball sports) was easier with conference membership. Huguenot Academy, Commonwealth Christian, and St. Vincent DePaul were all on the verge of closing their doors (it was a tough time for private schools in general). Shores did a probationary year in the VCC in 1994-95 where they played each VCC school, but they were not invited to full membership at the end of their probation. The Steward School was admitted shortly after that and the VCC stabilized for a while. Shores stayed independent until the 1999-2000 school year when they were re-admitted to the Metro.
True, as Coach Lance points out, a lot has changed since then for private school sports in general and football in particular.