South Alabama Sports

    By ARTHUR L. MACK Vigor coach John McKenzie parted ways with the school Friday for the second time in four years, according to the Mobile County Public School System. McKenzie was fired after leading the Wolves to a 12-2 finish and a berth in the Class 5A semifinals. He succeeded Marcus Cook, who was fired just as suddenly last summer. McKenzie was also put on administrative leave after leading Vigor to the 2021 Class 4A state title, then…

  By ARTHUR L. MACK After 11 months on the job, Juan Johnson resigned Wednesday as Baker High School’s head football coach to take the job at Class 7A James Clemens High in Madison. “It was a family-based decision,” Baker athletic director Daniel Kertis said in confirming Johnson’s dual moves. “He saw an opportunity that was better for him and his family. It’s always understandable but we’re very thankful for coach Johnson and his time at Baker.” Hornets defensive coordinator…

          TUSCALOOSA — The man who once said of himself that he had a face best suited for a hemorrhoid commercial was a pain in the butt for many opponents in the years he pushed and shoved and hoisted Alabama basketball from good to great. As for the fans, they just wanted the charmingly irascible Wimp Sanderson to smile a little more. Perhaps it was because Sanderson, now 87 and with flowing white hair, was back…

    By JIMMY WIGFIELD One couldn’t tell if Larry Henderson had worked up a sweat during the 1983 state championship game, nor if he had wished to absorb the traditional ice-water bath accorded the winning coach. Those things had been rendered indiscernible and unnecessary because so much rain had been dumped onto Legion Field that night that it could have filled every bathtub in Birmingham and then some. As he literally and figuratively floated off the field following the…

      Paul Davenport had no idea why he was being summoned to his head coach’s office in the offseason before his senior year but he did know three things: One, that coach was a large man whose head seemed to brush the sky and had a voice somewhere between thunder and a diesel engine on a dump truck. Two, that coach was the only person on a football field who could unnerve the otherwise unnervable and terrifying lineman…

    It won’t take long for a couple of Alabama high school football’s most monumental calculations of 2025 to be made and both will involve Terry Curtis. During January, the UMS-Wright legend will shape the future of two institutions — that of the Super 7 and of the coach himself. Curtis wields considerable influence as one of the state’s greatest coaches of all time and as president of the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s Central Board, which he said…

      By JIMMY WIGFIELD MOBILE — A decision on a possible new rotation for the Super 7 that might include Mobile’s Hancock-Whitney Stadium could come in January, according to Alabama High School Athletic Association Executive Director Heath Harmon. “I certainly think it’s a venue that is really nice,” Harmon said during Saturday’s Alabama-Mississippi All-Star Classic at the University of South Alabama’s on-campus stadium. “It’s been good being down here this week and we’re in the process of looking…

        MOBILE — Their final high school game complete, K.J. Lacey, C.D. Gill and Antonio Coleman posed for one last photograph for posterity with Saraland coach Jeff Kelly. It was the closing of one era for all four and the beginning of another in college football for Lacey, Gill and Coleman and, after deer season, for Kelly as he constructs another team. Coleman, who dislocated his left hand late in the proceedings, held the hefty trophy that…

By ARTHUR L. MACK MOBILE — Three late touchdowns set up by turnovers lifted the North to a 45-24 win in the North-South All-Star Game at Hancock-Whitney Stadium Friday. Pleasant Grove’s Tremell Washington broke a 24-24 tie late in the fourth quarter when he scored on a 64-yard touchdown pass from Fort Payne’s Dax Varadore after an interception. Moments later, North MVP Jamar Moultrie of Hoover returned an interception 56 yards for a touchdown and a fumbled snap at the…

        You can’t see the smokestacks from Interstate 65 going through Saraland. They must be there, right? Because some say Jeff Kelly has built a football factory that manufactures championships. But that insinuates that he slaps and sews and bolts the parts together dispassionately. If Kelly were supervising an assembly line, he’d have clones of K.J. Lacey, Ryan Williams, Santae McWilliams, C.D. Gill and Antonio Coleman every year and the Spartans would never lose. As it is,…