Clarke County coach Jason Massey lost his first head-to-head matchup with Leroy coach Chan Lowe but future games between the mentor and the pupil promise to be much more competitive. (Josie Pittman/Call News)
Leroy’s Ja’Kavien Collins takes a handoff from quarterback Jace Sellers in the 41-12 win over Clarke County Friday night in Grove Hill. Collins, who ran for two touchdowns, is among the veteran stars who make the Bears one of the favorites to win the Class 1A state title this season. (Josie Pittman/Call News)
GROVE HILL — Being a charitable sort of fellow, Clarke County’s Jason Massey didn’t make his former pupil, Chan Lowe, and his Leroy players dress out under a couple of umbrellas in the rain before their first game against each other as head coaches.
It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, for there were no obvious advantages Massey could latch onto. In fact, Massey and his Bulldogs were so accommodating that they supplied a dry locker room, two turnovers and plentiful short fields that led to the Bears’ 41-12 victory.
Lowe knew he had to take advantage of Massey’s temporarily reduced circumstances to take a 1-0 lead in their head-to-head series, especially since his old boss apparently still controlled the weather, just as he did in Leroy — something all the great coaches seem to have power over.
“The kids always made the joke that he actually had a force field,” Lowe said earlier this summer. “He just went and flipped the switch on it; it never rained on the practice field.”
It rained in Grove Hill until shortly before kickoff Friday, then stopped as if commanded by Massey, but even that wasn’t enough to help overmatched Clarke County in a game that went about as expected.
“I try to put friendships aside for a game but it’s still hard to do, especially with a friend like that, somebody that you owe so much success in your career to,” Lowe said. “I wanted to win but I was like, dang, I don’t ever want to do anything that would hurt him just because of the impact he’s had on my life as a coach.”
Massey overlooked the unfamiliar impact he felt in the seat of his pants delivered by Lowe.
“Getting your butt whipped ain’t enjoyable but I love those guys over there,” Massey said as he glanced at Leroy’s players and coaches after the game. “I coached all of them and with those coaches and I wish them all the luck from here on out. They play hard and they do things the right way.”
To a large degree, that also means doing it Massey’s way. While Lowe is deservedly enjoying the fruits of his labor, he’s also enjoying the harvest of Massey, who won a state championship at Leroy in 2022 with Lowe as his defensive coordinator. The Bears are one of the state’s top Class 1A programs and have seven state championships, a tradition Lowe has embraced and is ready to build upon with a lot of good athletes and, in a rarity for Leroy, a balanced offense with an effective passing game. An eighth Blue Map is plausible this season for a team that has been ranked for 42 straight weeks and been either No. 1 or No. 2 in 25 of the last 26 statewide polls.
Although Clarke County has won 22 straight region games and four straight 2A Region 1 championships, Massey is reconstructing the Bulldogs in his disciplined image and steadying a program shaken by charges of sexual misconduct with a student against former coach Rob Carter, who was arrested and fired in the wake of the scandal.
Ironically, Massey inflicted the last region loss on Clarke County when his Bears beat the Bulldogs 28-14 in October 2020.
When Massey returned to Leroy from a lengthy deployment with the Alabama National Guard last year, it would have been awkward for Lowe to give back the head coach’s whistle, especially after he followed Massey’s 2022 state championship with one of his own in 2023. Lowe said he would have happily made the sacrifice but didn’t have to when — in as clear a God thing as there is — the Clarke County job opened for Massey.
Massey was in the right place at the right time, just as Lowe was, and both were pleased that another Masseyism, as Lowe calls it, was proven true again.
“Be where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to be doing, when you’re supposed to be doing it,” Lowe said. “There’s a lot of Masseyisms in my vocabulary and the way I do things is a direct reflection of him.”
Those are so engrained in Leroy’s football culture that the players can complete the sentence when Lowe starts to tell them: “Be where you’re supposed to be …”
They weren’t sure they were in the right place at halftime Friday night when Lowe bounded into the locker room in disgust, although leading 20-6, because he felt his players thought the Bulldogs would gladly throw themselves in front of the Bears’ bus.
“I really do feel like they responded well because I may or may not have lost my mind at halftime,” Lowe said. “I basically just proved a point because I told them all week that I didn’t think we had a great week of preparation. And I told them that’s still coach Massey over there. No matter what you think by watching them (on video), they’re going to be prepared and they’re going to do things right. I felt like if we came out and played well, it would be that type of game just because of how we are talented at this point in time and I know he’s still trying to fix a lot up there. But if we played the first and second quarter like we played the third quarter, we should have handled our business a lot earlier.”
That business was neatly summed up this way: Leroy had 21 tackles for a loss, led by linebacker D.J. Marshall with five. The Bulldogs had one.
The Bears came with considerable weapons, some of which were used and others not.
In the pregame warmup, two-way star Ja’Kavien Collins punted with such length and hang time that the ball seemed to touch the low-lying clouds. But Leroy never punted, owing that to a balanced offense — 20 runs, 19 passes — that Lowe remained committed to despite the weather. And who is coordinating an offense that also has just one turnover in two games? None other than Massey’s son, Grant.
Lowe said he tried to break all of his tendencies to surprise his mentor, including two-back looks, shovel passes and twins wings.
“I tried to do stuff we had in our playbook that he had showed me but we had never really used while he was here,” Lowe said. “But he got us, too. He knew he would get cover three from us (on defense) and he threw four verticals twice off of it. One of them was a big gain, another one was six.”
And that was Massey’s victory, as the Bulldogs mustered only 14 yards of total offense in the season-opening 17-0 loss to Flomaton, then more than doubled it with a 34-yard play-action post from Peebo Pugh to Keondre Hill in the first quarter. Pugh’s 24-yard pass to Jayvion James in the seam in the second quarter was the first touchdown of the Massey era.
Future games between the two coaching friends will likely be much more competitive.
“I know he will get it right,” Lowe said.
