Small-town rivalry sullied by violence

A little closer, and the country quiet yielded to the sounds of people cheering and a band playing something vaguely familiar.

Closer yet there was the sight of kids colliding on a pitted field. It was homecoming at Warren County High School, and the student population of 192 was pretty much all either on the field or in the stands. At last count, the county held 5,800 people. Maybe a fifth of them were here to observe the rites of small-town high school football.

Yet, as ideals go, this one was flawed. Something was not quite right in Warren County on Friday night.

Instead of being on the sideline with his players, the Screaming Devils’ head coach, David Daniel, was up in the press box, sitting as quietly as he could while his team was getting drilled by Washington-Wilkes.

He was looking at the game through a right eye that tilted toward the color of pumpkin. An antiseptic balm gave the slightly swollen side of his face an unnatural shine.

Just a week before, after a game at neighboring Hancock County High, a skirmish broke out outside the Warren County locker room. As he jumped in to protect one of his players, Daniel was struck multiple times by a swinging helmet, crushing the side of his face.

Also shattered was the comfortable notion of high school football as the pride of the small-town South, the font of good, old-fashioned values and the forge of better young men. The story of a coach being gravely injured seeped out of this persistently anonymous pocket of Georgia and was picked up by the big media, because things like that weren’t supposed to happen at places like this.

Pain goes deep

As the two counties wrestle for answers to what happened and for a measure of justice, one coach tries to heal.

Daniel, 57, has coached nearly from the day he graduated from Newberry (S.C.) College in 1977, working as an assistant at multiple small schools around Georgia before getting his first chance as a head coach this season. Until Oct. 14, he said he never could have imagined being hurt like this by the only job he ever wanted.

Watching his team lose 34-13 on Friday night to Washington-Wilkes, his players obviously suffering a hangover from the events of last week, Daniel was pained by the performance.

A team that prides itself on defense was being overrun. “This is awful, just awful,” the coach muttered at halftime. “We’re not focused at all. I got linebackers not taking drops. People ignoring their responsibility. Wilkes is playing great, doing a great job, but we ain’t given up points like this all year.”

Their distracted play made him question whether he should have even showed up at all. His wife argued against him going. He couldn’t do much — doctors told him to avoid any exertion or excitement, a friend even had to take over his chore of wrapping the players’ ankles. And Daniel fretted that the emotions stirred by his presence were working against his team.

At one point, though, he stopped himself in mid-criticism.

“They’re kids and that’s what high school kids do,” he said. “In the grand scheme of things, this ain’t much. Last week was kind of a wake-up call for me. They could have taken me out. I could not be here right now. I was pounded pretty good.”

Considerable pain accompanied the facial-reconstruction surgery Daniel underwent last weekend. There are five small plates holding together the fractured bones around his right eye and along his cheek. Bones that Warren County Superintendent of Schools Carole Jean Carey said were “crushed like corn flakes.”

As deep as the physical pain, the coach said, was the disheartenment left behind.

For instance, he said, a week after the altercation, he has heard not one word from the coaches or the administrators at Hancock County. Daniel was an assistant at Hancock in the mid-1990s.

“No, sir, and that bothers me, too,” he said.

“I don’t understand it. They’re good people. I don’t get it.”

No one from Hancock County is talking much. For much of last week, Sheriff Tomlyn Primus was not commenting on the pace of his investigation, while disputing Carey’s account of the incident. “A lot of the things she’s saying are not true,” Primus said. On Thursday, he relented to pressure applied by Carey’s office to bring the GBI into the case.

When approached after practice Wednesday, Hancock County coach Zackery Harris said he could not speak about the incident, saying only, “I’m frustrated, too. I want to get our side of the story out.” He referred all questions to Hancock Superintendent of Schools Gwendolyn Jefferson Reeves.

Reeves did not return calls to her office.

Where things went wrong

Warren and Hancock counties are separated by a narrow stretch of the Ogeechee River and not much else.

Both are lightly populated, Hancock the bigger of the two with a population of 9,400.

Both are poor, ranked in the bottom 10 of the poorest counties in Georgia according to the state’s job tax credit ranking.

Both have a majority black population.

And both have labored in football in the shadow of regional powerhouse Lincoln County.

Envy could not have been a motive.

The rivalry between the schools is intense, coaches say. And trouble could have been brewing since Oct. 7, an off date for Warren County. Daniel, an assistant and a group of his players went to watch Hancock play Washington-Wilkes. There reportedly was some woofing between Hancock and Warren County players afterward.

Reports made the rounds on sports-talk radio that Hancock County has been a rough place to play in the past, but Ralph Swearngin, the executive director of the Georgia High School Association, said, “No one recalled anything specific in my inquiries with two or three other schools in that region.”

According to witnesses from Warren County, there were no clues of potential trouble during the game. As they have the past six years, the Screaming Devils won. But many of those other scores were far more lopsided than this one (20-2).

“The game ended, and I thought everything was good to go, we’re fine,” Daniel said. “We shook hands, our team prayed. And I don’t remember much after the prayer.”

Daniel’s injuries have clouded his recollection of the assault. “There’s a lot of gray in my brain right now,” he said. “I talked with the GBI [Friday]; there are a lot of things I don’t remember. Like I told them, go look at what happened to me. No wonder I can’t remember anything.”

Superintendent Carey, along with her husband, was following the team back to the visiting locker room, located on the opposite end of a field house from the Hancock locker room.

Waiting outside, she said, was a group of Hancock players. The door to the Warren County locker room was locked, and a team manager was unable to get it open. Then, Carey said, “a couple of our kids were rushed by them and the others went to their help. That’s when they started getting beat with the helmets. At that point everybody was sort of into it.”

Daniel went to the aid of one of his starting linebackers, but not before that player suffered a concussion that kept him out of Friday’s game against Washington-Wilkes. The coach, according to statements from his players, was struck multiple times in the head by a helmet swung like a battle-ax.

The effects of that night followed the team back to school Monday, the superintendent said. “I was really worried about my kids and when they got back,” she said. “My big, tough football players were very shaken and said they were very scared.”

Carey has raised a series of questions she hopes the GBI investigation will answer. Such as: Where was the security at the time of the fight; who was behind what seemed to her to be a premeditated event; why didn’t the Hancock County Sheriff take statements from her or the team afterward; why did it seem that only Warren County players were pepper-sprayed by authorities who came in to break up the disturbance?

“For the very first time since being a superintendent I was sort of frightened, frightened for our guys,” she said.

Spotlight on Sparta

Reports of that night meandered down the one main street of Sparta, the seat of Hancock County. The storefronts are mostly empty here, but from inside a couple of those where commerce still has a barely beating heart, the owners certainly didn’t need any more bad news.

Sparta is known as the birthplace of pro-basketball-playing twins Horace and Harvey Grant and now as the site of an ugly incident held up as sure proof of the slow death of sportsmanship.

“You’d think they’d want to do something about it so it wouldn’t happen again,” said Robert Hattaway, owner of Hattaway Furniture, criticizing the hometown authorities. “The way I feel about it now, let ’em not play this year or the next year.”

“You always have some problems at ballgames,” said Charlie Collins, owner of Collins Music, “but nothing where you disrespect a coach like that. You just don’t expect anything like that in Sparta.”

Said Sparta Mayor William Evans, “Yes I’m concerned about how this makes us look, but let’s get all the facts first.”

And, of course, the incident was big news in Warren County. But hardly news that was confined to the hometown paper, the Warrenton Clipper. This thing spread, striking a sad note with people around the country.

“I didn’t know it would be this big of a deal nationwide,” Carey said. “But if you think about it, it is something that could be faced anywhere in the United States, and it is horrific that a coach could be hurt like that by an opposing player for no reason at all. It is a national topic and something that we should all be looking at.”

Some answers, though, will never come.

“I don’t understand it,” Daniel said softly from the press box at halftime, while the band played and the homecoming court was being crowned.

“I’ve been in this a long time. To intentionally try to hurt somebody? I don’t get it, I just don’t get it. It makes no sense to me.”