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Home > Jeff Schultz > Archives > 2008 > October > 03
Friday, October 3, 2008
High School football in Valdosta is a different game
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Valdosta — The old football coach is sitting in his usual seat on the 50. Funny thing about old football coaches. Twenty years into retirement and they still sound like an old football coach.
“I’m worried about this one,” Joe Wilson says as he watches Northside from Warner Robins go through warm-ups. “What are they — like 35-0? I’m worried.”
As he speaks, more than 13,000 fans are squeezing into a stadium for a high school football game. There is tailgating in the parking lot. There is national media coverage.
There is a school, Lowndes — once the gum under Valdosta’s shoe and now with five state titles and 5,000 season-ticket holders — preparing to play a game billed as one of the biggest in the history of Georgia high school football.
“It’s come a long way in the last 30 years,” said Wilson, the former Lowndes coach who started all this with a state championship in 1980. “When I got here this stadium was like a band box. But now, look.”
Yes, look.
High school football is different in Valdosta. Always has been. Buck Belue, the former Georgia quarterback who grew up here and starred at Valdosta High, tried to explain earlier in the day: “I can just tell you what it was like when I was 9 or 10 years old, looking forward to going to the game every Friday night. It was like going to a town hall meeting every Friday.”
Yes, look.
Somebody is going to need a bigger room.
Lowndes will need at least a couple of decades to catch Valdosta’s record of 23 state titles. But the Vikings certainly look on track for a sixth title after Friday’s 24-7 victory against Northside, which had a 35-game winning streak.
If nothing else, Northside cheerleaders took pre-game smack talk to a new level. They held up a banner reading, “Hey Lowndes. The Real State champs are ‘N’ town.”
Northside players ran through the banner.
Then Lowndes ran through Northside.
High school football in Valdosta used to be big because of one school. Now it’s big because of two. Valdosta High built a powerhouse under the late Wright Bazemore, who won 14 state titles (of the school’s 23). The tradition and the atmosphere merely were squared when Lowndes, mocked as “Plowboys” for their location in the relative country, rose to power under Wilson.
It’s with some irony that Wilson, a former Valdosta player and assistant coach, was the one who helped create this. He left Valdosta not long after being spurned for the opening there when Bazemore retired. He left the school where players sang the lampooning tune: “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Plowboys.” The country bumpkins morphed into a power, winning the first of five state titles in 1980.
But the game everybody remembers was in 1977, when Lowndes defeated Valdosta for the first time, 7-2.
Wilson points down to the field, near the 30-yard line.
“Right down there is where we tore Buck Belue’s jersey off,” he said.
They talk about that game like it was last week, not 31 years ago. Belue is no different.
“I had to play the rest of the game with a different number,” he said. “After the game, I remember sitting on that yellow school bus and all the Lowndes kids are around the bus chanting, ‘7-2, we beat you.’ We were devastated.”
David Parker smiles.
“I was in the stands,” he said. “I was in the eighth grade.”
Three years later, he was Valdosta’s starting quarterback, when Lowndes won its first state title. It’s still a painful memory. He went on to play at Princeton and attended medical school there. When he returned to the area, he and wife moved into the Lowndes’ district, one mile from the Valdosta dividing line.
Parker has two children at Lowndes. But he wore a Georgia red shirt to game, standing out among the mostly maroon-clad Lowndes crowd.
“I still can’t wear maroon,” he said. “I’m just now getting to the point where I can say ‘we’ when I’m talking about Lowndes.”
Yes, look. Valdosta recently was named as “Titletown USA” by ESPN. Even Parker called the designation “a little hokey.”
But the city was only in the hokey discussion because of high school football. Valdosta High put the city on the map. Lowndes has changed the landscape.
