Column: Breaking a losing tradition

When coach Kirk told me about his plan to have the earliest practice allowed by GHSA rules, I thought it sounded crazy.

However, when I got there around 10 minutes before midnight I began to doubt the craziness of the plan. It might have been the way the team captains Charles Smothers and Jon Holton both came and thanked me for coming out and the other newshounds out covering the event, or just the guys as they took the field to count down the seconds before they could cut loose and begin another season of football.

Regardless, there was energy in the still air at Panther Stadium. As Thursday night rolled into Friday morning, the Panthers began warm-ups.

After completing warm-ups the practice really got underway as the guys broke into group stations. As I made the rounds between the offensive and defensive locations on the field, I noticed that each of the players was completely focused on what they were doing.

It was clear that this team that does not want a repeat of last year’s record.

As the players continued practice, I wandered around the sidelines taking a few photographs and struck up a conversation with a pair of the support team, commonly, the water girls. While chatting with the girls, they told me that Kirk is laying down the law to the guys. Besides rules about contact during practice, the coach apparently told the players that they were not allowed into an area of the field house where the girls had stuff and the consequences were stiff. Any thoughts of Kirk being crazy in his plan, had faded.

The coach obviously remembered what it was like to be in high school and knew what to do about it. Here was the football team on the field at 1:30 a.m., with a handful of girls present, that most of the guys would kill themselves trying to impress and were not allowed to have any contact.

Kirk was drilling discipline into these guys from the start.

Throughout the practice the one thought that kept bouncing in my mind, was that all the pre-season working out, the changes in the coaching staff, and even the early practice was all going to be for nothing if the players weren’t going to go all out.
It was the end of the practice, 2:30 in the morning, when that thought vanished.

Kirk called all the players towards the center of the field. The guys were winded, with buckets of sweat running down their backs when Kirk started to tell them about the season. The best way to describe the moment would be to reference a movie where the underdog is down and almost out and someone gives a speech that puts the fight back into them and they come back to achieve an impossible goal.

The guys cheered.

Has Jackson County’s football team been the worst in the region? Arguably, yes.

Have these returning players been walked all over and laughed at because of last year? No doubt.

Does any of that matter to this team, this year and will it stop the Panthers playing for their goals this year?

If it does you could have fooled me at 2:30 a.m. Friday.

Justin Poole is a reporter for Mainstreet News, Inc. Contact him at justin@mainstreetnews.com.