At a small school best known for basketball, a football milestone is within reach

Jess DeVoursney has been a head football coach for six months, and he’s already one win away from a piece of school history.

DeVoursney can become Taylor County’s first coach to start 4-0 in his first season since Bill Montgomery in 1997. That season sparked the best two-year stretch in program history, as the Vikings won their only two region championships in 1997 and 1998.

Taylor County has plenty of winning history — just not on the football field. The Class A school in Butler (51 miles east of Columbus) is best known for its 14 state championships in girls and boys basketball.

But when DeVoursney came to Taylor County as an assistant coach five years ago, he knew the Vikings had “football school” potential.

“This place was kind of known to be a basketball school,” DeVoursney said. “We see these dudes walking around the hallways, and we’re like, ‘Dude, shoot, this is a football school. It’s not even close,’ and that was our mindset.

“Flip the script, and we’ve finally got it flipped now. The kids believe they’re football players now.”

To be clear, DeVoursney doesn’t claim to be anti-basketball. The son of state champion football coach Steve DeVoursney coached Taylor County’s boys basketball team the past two seasons, though building the football program was part of his motivation.

“That was the hugest part of our kind of turnaround from year one to year two because we didn’t have any of the athletes out,” DeVoursney said. “Like year one, we went 2-8.”

“Getting those kids out that were in school and that were on the court flipped us easily back from 2-8 to 6-4 (the next year).”

DeVoursney found athletes like senior TyQuavion Pinkard, a point guard who played football as a kid before deciding to focus on basketball in high school. Pinkard first met his future head coach on the basketball court and decided to play high school football for the first time last year.

“I played football one year, and I just loved playing it,” Pinkard said.

Pinkard came back at a good time. The Vikings’ season included a seven-game winning streak that featured a momentous 36-23 win over Schley County.

DeVoursney saw things change after beating Schley County, which had won three of the last four region championships and had played in the state championship three years before.

“We felt like were just right there knocking on the door, but I think that Schley win last year opened all our players’ minds up like, ‘Yeah, we can be that team that everybody fears,’” DeVoursney said.

The Vikings enter Week 5 as the top team in Class A’s PSR standings. They’re ranked No. 5 in Class A and enter Friday as 10-point favorites over Wheeler County.

Arguably more importantly for DeVoursney, the focus has shifted: The Vikings aren’t just passing time until basketball season.

“You start winning, everything becomes more fun, and those practices ain’t so bad either,” DeVournsey said. “So they’ve kind of tasted the success of it and all the hard work that goes into it.

“They’ve taken ownership of it, and they want to be a football school.”

Building a “football school” mentality wasn’t just difficult for Taylor County’s players. It was a change for DeVoursney, who had spent the first seven years of his coaching career at Cairo, a South Georgia school with a strong football heritage.

The former Valdosta State linebacker had to get used to coaching athletes whose primary sport wasn’t football.

“You had to treat them a little bit differently because you couldn’t expect them to go to do football stuff when they had no idea what it is,” he said. “So the biggest thing coming in was creating relationships with the kids, and I will say once you create a relationship with these kids, they will run through a wall for you.”

Taylor County — which has an enrollment of 345 according to U.S. News and World Report and is one of the smallest football-playing schools in the GHSA — is also starting to get attention as a producer of college football talent. The program had defensive lineman Brayden Ellison sign with West Georgia in February 2025 and had linebacker Chan Lumpkin sign with Tulane last December.

But the Vikings’ newest top prospect brings another level of national attention to Butler.