A celebrated rivalry, a Southern ritual: why Savannah Friday nights are about much more than bragging rights.

It’s halftime at Memorial Stadium, and the Benedictine Cadets are beating the Savannah High School Blue Jackets 29-0. The tackles, turnovers and touchdowns have taken their toll on the team: Most of the players are sitting on the locker-room floor with their heads against green concrete. The un-air-conditioned room is silent, except for the sound of a giant fan and a few screaming players. The coaches are doing their best to break up fights and shore up spirits.

“Anyone can be happy up on a mountaintop!” coach Barik Bryant tells them. “The team who perseveres is the team who can walk through the valley and still be happy.”

“We just got to get that tackle; we’ll be alright,” coach Eric Brown repeats.

The Blue Jackets haven’t had a winning season in 14 years, but this year was supposed to be different. The new head coach, David Jackson, wants to rebuild his program and make it mean something again to wear the blue and white, as it did when he wore it in the ’80s. He’s been building up tonight’s game against Benedictine for weeks. Savannah High and Benedictine have the oldest rivalry in the state of Georgia: They’ve been playing each other since the beginning of the 20th century. So when Benedictine scored two touchdowns just five minutes after kickoff—the second one followed by a two-point conversion—it was a bitter pill to swallow.

In the locker room, the players can barely hear their band playing “Ring My Bell” out on the field. They suit up and jog back to the north end zone. Thrusting their hands in the middle of a huddle, they chant, “Blue Jackets on three! Blue Jackets on three!”
“1, 2, 3, Blue Jackets!”

Flecks of white creep into his hair and beard, but head coach David Jackson still looks like a formidable linebacker. He can sprint as fast as any of his players. A former police officer in Atlanta, he graduated from Savannah High in 1985. Other members of his coaching staff are shouters, but Jackson talks so soft that when the team gathers around, they have to be dead silent to listen. And they are.

“No regrets,” he told his players before the game. “Leave everything on the field.”

Jackson knew he had his work cut out for him when he moved up from coaching at Myers Middle School this year. To take a team that hasn’t had a winning season since 1995 and turn them around is about more than plays and conditioning. It’s about giving them their pride back. “We’re doing away with this losing culture,” he believes.

Like what you’re reading? Read the full article in the October/November issue of South magazine.

   

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