SPORTS

Peabody coaching staff looks back on championship run

Brandon Shields

TRENTON – Peabody assistant football coach Frank Hodges said he wasn’t sure what he would’ve said to his son Daniel if the Golden Tide hadn’t come back on Huntingdon in the first round of the Class 2A playoffs.

“We were down 21-7 and not playing well, and I thought, ‘What am I gonna say to him?’ Because it would’ve been over that night,” Hodges said.

The elder Hodges, whose son was a senior defensive back on the team this year, had similar thoughts the following week when Peabody went into halftime down 17-7 to Trinity Christian Academy.

It’s probably a good thing he never thought of what to say because if he had, he never would’ve had to say it. In fact, Frank Hodges said he couldn’t remember anything being said when he found his son in the closing minutes of the Class 2A championship.

“I just remember hugging him and crying because being a part of this was already special, but being a part of it with your son makes it a lot more special,” Hodges said.

Similar statements were made by a number of members of the Golden Tide’s coaching staff, which is partially made of men who grew up in Trenton, played for the Golden Tide and have coached there for years combined with other football minds who have come to Trenton and helped put together what culminated last week in a championship.

Head coach Ricky Woods and now his seven championship rings is the most obvious part of that.

“I’ve been asked about how this team and this championship stacks up with the others a few times,” Woods said. “And this one is special because it’s the most recent, but they’re like your kids – they’re all different but all equally special.”

Ron Oakes came to Trenton with him after coaching with Woods in Mississippi. He coached the line this year and helped defensive coordinator Shane Jacobs in game planning.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever coached a group of linemen who were so focused and zoned in on a job they had to do each week,” Oakes said. “You might get that from a group two or three times a year for the big games, but they were like that every week.”

Jacobs has been around the current group of Tide players since early in their high school careers and has gotten to know who works well in what situations. He said among all the stories of individual achievement on the team like lineman Raheem Overstreet and defensive back Xavier Ball, an unlikely hero in the state title game just produced another story to tell about the team that won it all.

“Willis Johnson was a great scout player for us all year long,” Jacobs said. “Whenever I needed one for scout team, I never had to look for him. He was there.

“Then when Zay Coleman got hurt against Adamsville, we needed someone to play against Marion County. He’d never started a game in his whole life, then we put him in for the state championship game. That was great to see.”

Woods said there are a lot of smaller anecdotes that can be told within the larger arc that was the championship season. The story has been told of how he told lineman Grant McEwen in the spring he thought the team was good enough to compete for state, but it was in a time of adversity in a 26-point loss that he knew for sure they would.

“You probably won’t believe this, but the night we got beat at Union City was when I saw we had the ability to compete,” Woods said. “They were the best team we played all year, and we played with them early on.

“Then we had a couple of turnovers that gave them a big lead, but not a single kid on our team quit or let up. They kept going and going and trying to win. When you have kids with the ability these kids have and the fight they showed that night, then you’ve got a shot at winning state.”

Of course it took more than ability and enthusiasm to win state. It took a turnover on a fumble just before halftime to grab some momentum from Huntingdon in the first round. It took a couple of key plays against a banged up team from TCA to get that win.

Woods said the week of the quarterfinals against McKenzie may have been the most nervous he was of the entire run.

“It’s so hard to beat a team twice in a season I don’t care how bad you beat them,” Woods said. “Then you throw in a coach as good as Coach [Wade] Comer who had a better team coming in that night than earlier in the year and knows how to get the best out of his boys. That win was almost a relief.”

The weather helped Peabody get the win over Adamsville. Down 24-6 in the third quarter, a stiff wind from Peabody’s back kept Adamsville’s punts short, allowing them to have a short field to try to score after forcing Adamsville into three-and-out situations on three consecutive turnovers to get the lead.

Then after that, the championship was simply about being the better team and playing like it against Marion County.

“It takes luck too,” said Oaks, who’s been in seven state championship games as a coach.

Consistency helped too.

“At the beginning of the playoffs, we told them they were 20 quarters away from a championship,” Woods said. “They just had to play 20 good quarters and they would win. They did that and they won, and I’m proud of them for the type of character they showed in winning each game.”

Brandon Shields, 425-9751