This Friday, Mississippi will enter its 115th high school football season.
The first game in Mississippi high school football history came on December 9, 1905. It was on that day that Yazoo City defeated Winona in Mississippi’s first-ever high school football game by a final score of 5-0. Back in those days, a touchdown counted five points.
The timeline gets a little hazy when discussing the beginning of Calhoun County’s football programs. I’ve done some research on the topic, but it will likely take months or even years of digging to discover when and where each school played its first football game, not to mention the schools that no longer exist in our county (if any reader has any information on these topics, please feel free to email me).
Still, we know that football has been in Calhoun County a long time, and we’ve all taken pride in how our programs have represented our home for the last century.
This season marks a new era in many ways for football in Calhoun County. We have two new head coaches in our midst in Brennan Pugh and Chad White, and time will tell what their legacies will be on Calhoun County’s history. Vardaman and Calhoun City will both look different offensively this season than they have in recent memory with these new coaches at the helm, and we’ll soon know just how efficiently these teams can light up the scoreboards this fall.
Bruce, despite having multiple playoff appearances in this span, is searching for its first winning season since 2013. That stretch of five years is the longest the program has gone without a winning season in the playoff era which began in 1981. The Trojans made a step in the right direction last year by gaining a postseason berth after winning only two games in 2017, but they hope to take even bigger strides under third-year head coach Clint Faust this season.
There’s also Calhoun Academy, who, if you believed the rumors that swirled the county this summer, is fortunate to be fielding a team after low roster numbers dimmed that possibility leading up to preseason practices. The Cougars find themselves in a new region after MAIS reclassification, a region that features teams in the Delta and one in Arkansas.
This is all to say that times are changing in Calhoun County, but it’s still a time to be excited about this season and the future. There are new storylines every year, but this year, with so much change surrounding each of our four programs, it seems that there may be more to keep your eye on this year than ever before. How will Pugh and White fare in their inaugural seasons at Vardaman and City, respectively? Can Faust and the Trojans continue moving in the right direction as they seek to make the postseason for a second-straight year? Can Calhoun Academy, simply put, stay healthy enough to compete this season in a spread-out division?
Time will tell, but this is a new and exciting era of Calhoun County football, and you’re fortunate to be along for the ride.
You can email John Macon at jmake2016@gmail.com
