South Alabama Sports

SARALAND — Rarely challenged last year on the way to the state championship, Saraland found itself embroiled in a genuine fight for survival Friday night against Lipscomb Academy. It was protracted combat, given all the ESPN commercials and heat timeouts, the only pauses in an otherwise honorable effort to bend each other’s faces into a vat of hot tar. This was expected. The esteemed and nationally ranked Mustangs had won 21 straight games and two straight Tennessee state championships before…

    By JIMMY WIGFIELD SARALAND — It was so hot this week that one Saraland assistant coach saw the glue in the soles of his shoes melt at practice. The Spartans’ souls were similarly laid bare once ESPN’s cameras came on Friday night for the nationally televised game against Lipscomb Academy. One wondered if half the team was going to get hauled to the infirmary. “Everybody was hurting,” said All-American receiver Ryan Williams, who was repeatedly denied the deep…

By JIMMY WIGFIELD SARALAND — Saraland’s brand of football will be shown from Atlantic sands to Pacific forests, across the fruited plains and atop purple mountains’ majesty Friday night. When ESPN televises the Spartans’ season opener against Lipscomb Academy, it will include three state championship trophies spread across two Southern states, a half-dozen of the country’s most elite players and enough recruiting stars to form another Milky Way. This is not bad for a program that started out a little…

  By JIMMY WIGFIELD NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman Kevin Mawae got his first loss as a head coach out of the way last week and is ready to walk a more familiar path, which happens to go through Saraland Friday night. “I’m 0-1 as a head coach right now and that’s not very fun but no one is perfect,” Mawae said after a 35-10 loss to IMG Academy in his Lipscomb Academy head coaching debut last week. “There’s…

    Santae McWilliams gives Saraland’s offense devastating balance on the ground. (Call News file photo)     By JIMMY WIGFIELD SARALAND — With all due respect to Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, all they had to do was figure out how to split the atom. They never had the daunting task of devising a scheme to blow up Saraland’s offense. Could they have done it? They were part of the Manhattan Project but how about the Man, Can’t Handle…

IT’S THIS BIG! Can Saraland’s high-powered offense be stopped? Can Mary G. Montgomery  challenge for a Blue Map? Look for the answers to these and many other questions in southwest Alabama’s best high school football preview hitting the streets on Aug. 23. Every school in Mobile and Washington counties is covered by the Call News, which was recently awarded for the best sports coverage in the state in its division by the Alabama Press Association.  

Staff Report Defending Class 6A state champion Saraland is the overwhelming choice for No. 1 in the Alabama Sports Writers Association preseason football poll released Wednesday. The Spartans are joined by 6A Region 1 rivals Theodore at No. 5 and Spanish Fort at No. 9. Mary Montgomery, coming off its first winning season and first playoff berth in 20 years, is the only ranked Mobile-area team in Class 7A at No. 9. In Class 5A, perennial power UMS-Wright is No.…

By ARTHUR L. MACK Saraland’s Morgan Davis finished her high school career by winning the bronze medal in the women’s long jump at the Pan-Am Games U20 Championships Friday in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Davis jumped 19 feet, 8 inches on her final jump to clinch bronze just behind Team USA teammate Avery Lewis (20-5) and Brazil’s Vanessa Sena dos Santos (20-3). Davis said weather conditions early in the competition frustrated her but she pressed on. “It was a little tough…

By JIMMY WIGFIELD The state’s winningest high school football coach doubts much can be done to stanch the influence of NIL deals and the allure of easy transfers now occurring with regularity in college football. That influence on high school football came to the foreground when Mobile Christian star linebacker and Alabama commitment Sterling Dixon announced he is transferring to Spanish Fort for his senior year, ostensibly to improve his name, image and likeness value. UMS-Wright coach Terry Curtis, who…

While high school football has never meant more to Alabama’s burgs, cities and rural hamlets, the flag is already being lowered to half-mast for the sport in honor of the way we have long idealized it — a bastion of community pride and loyalty, an incubator without peer from which boys are transformed into men. It’s on its way to the hospital and may not come back alive — or at least not the way many of us remember it.…