The last year the football team had a winning season was 2019-2020, when the current seniors were in the sixth grade. Ever since the pandemic, the team hasn’t been able to win more than four out of 10 games a season at best, and most students have come to accept a sub-par football team as a fact of life.
Teran Conley’s first year head coaching at White Station High School (WSHS) was 2022, and subsequently the team braced itself for a rebuild. By the start of the 2023 season, players reported a boost in morale, and some even anticipated a winning season. By the end of the 2024 season, that dream was long put to rest, and former head coach Conley was switched out for a new head coach, Coley Thornton, along with his staff. Now, with another year of new leadership, the success of the team is up in the air again, facing another potential cycle of losing seasons or the hope of rebuilding for the better.
“I think any time you have change in a program as important as your football program it’s always going to take a little bit of time,” Thornton said. “We don’t want it to take very long.”
The first few games haven’t painted an entirely favorable picture. The team has now lost its first 3 games, albeit against two highly ranked teams, and losing by one point to Central after a controversial touchdown call-back.
“We learned in the first game [WSHS vs. Christian Brothers High School (CBHS)] that [change] is not easy,” Thornton said. “What I do think is we learned little bitty parts of that process [that] we can do better.”
While Thornton and his staff are identifying and working on technical feedback from games, they’ve also made significant aesthetic and cultural changes. Over the summer they renovated the locker rooms, purchased new uniforms, and hosted a media day and a Meet the Team day, making the team’s culture more inviting.
“He’s not the coach to try to help only one guy get up,” Harrison Woods (12) said. “He don’t care about none of that. He wants to help the person who’s gonna play, who’s gonna give it their all at practice every day.”
WSHS’s schedule has also changed significantly this year, as it’s now playing more private and rural schools with access to different resources. Changes in the schedule could make tracking progress difficult, as different opponents could be more or less challenging to defeat.
“I think it will be easier because we’re gonna have to play like all the teams and they seem like the overall 0-6,” Woods said. “We’re going to make the playoffs either way.”
Unlike various past coaches, Thornton stands in the field and weight room with his players the entire duration of practice, building bonds with his players. Thornton works to build a bridge between players and coaches, believing it will create trust and result in more success.
“All the time, [players must] trust what we’re telling them to do,” Thornton said. “They revert to bad habits because they don’t completely trust this [coaching] … That’s just something we have to do as coaches. We have to do a good job convincing them that our way works.”
From a glance, the team doesn’t seem to lack talent, strength or speed. The team receives several offers annually, and has players on its roster well over 250 pounds and 6 feet tall. Part of Thorton’s challenge is to identify what exactly is going wrong.
“I think if you tell somebody they’re responsible for a guy on man coverage, and they’re going to watch that guy, and their eyes roam and go somewhere where they’re not supposed to be, that gets them in trouble,” Thornton said. “And then they look around and they’re like, ‘Why did [you] not cover that guy?’ Well, because you weren’t looking at him like we told you to … I think just the attention to detail and … to what instruction you’re given [is important].”
Despite the team’s troubled history, they still have significant support and a substantial fanbase, and there remains an energy surrounding football games. Week one against CBHS, per tradition, students flooded the student section, even breaking a row of bleachers. Like years prior, students proudly raised the spartan flag passed down from senior class to senior class, and cheered on the anonymous senior dressed as a banana.
“We’ve got to have good people playing football for us,” Thornton said. “We’ve got to have them doing the right things and playing an exciting brand of football that our kids are going to come out and watch and support.”