The year lifelong fans in this Lancaster County SC football town weren’t in the stands
Tim “Punkin” Sims has been coming to these games for 50 years.
He’s called Kershaw, the small town in Lancaster County, S.C., home his whole life — well before he graduated from Andrew Jackson High School in 1981 and even before the school was built back in 1969.
Sims told me over the phone earlier this week that he didn’t want to stretch it and say he’s been to 200 games, but he said the number is around there. And his fandom is unquestioned: He remembers watching the would-be NFL player Corey Miller from Pageland. (“Ah yes, the Master of Pain,” he said and laughed.) He remembers how close AJ got to winning its first and would-be only state championship in 1990. And he was the public address announcer during the team’s special run last year, when the Volunteers put together a second straight winning season for the first time in decades.
But when Andrew Jackson made history earlier this season — defeating once-archrival Central of Pageland on the road for the first time since 1982 — Sims wasn’t in the stands. He couldn’t get his hands on a ticket.
“I was used to being able to go where I wanted, when I wanted,” Sims said. “It’s been very hard to get used to.”
This season, to account for venue capacity reductions because of the coronavirus, the Lancaster County School District is pre-selling all tickets to its athletic events. Football athletes are sold up to four tickets per game, and because of that, grandparents are missing chances to see their grandsons play football. Aunts and uncles aren’t seeing their nephews play. And many AJ graduates, some of whom don’t live in Kershaw anymore but go to the Friday night football games to reconnect with the community they grew up in, haven’t seen the Volunteers at all this year.
For many, it’s a consequence of the unpredictable, COVID-adjusted 2020 season. And it’s uniquely felt in towns across South Carolina where “football is king.”
“Not being able to go, I realized (going to games) is something you take for granted,” Doug Adams told me in a phone conversation earlier this week. Adams graduated from AJ in 1999, and although he lives in Irmo now, he makes three-to-five games in a normal year.
He’s a longtime statistician and record-keeper of AJ as well, with a website called Volunteer Legacy that has all the information on AJ’s athletic history that you can think of.
“Before, if I could go to a game, I’m going,” Adams said, adding, “Kershaw is just a small town, and you get that family atmosphere. Any time you’re around them, you just feel like you’re with family.”
Earlier this month, Andrew Jackson went into a two-week shutdown after multiple individuals affiliated with the football program tested positive for COVID-19. The Volunteers will play three games in two weeks now. Their next game is on Monday — the first time this has happened since 2011, when weather paused a game against Great Falls, Adams told me — and after that, they have their first home game/Senior Night against Fairfield Central on Friday.
The Volunteers aren’t the only ones with these struggles: Earlier this week, York County’s Clover was sent into a two-week quarantine; Nation Ford had its game postponed; and Fort Mill had a game canceled, then rescheduled, only to have that game canceled again.
“It’s a little bit hard to exactly say how we would do it differently,” AJ head coach Todd Shigley said. I’d called him after his first practice on the field in two weeks on Wednesday, and he caught me up on all that happened: on all the precautions AJ football had in place before the virus infiltrated the team; on what the team did when they got word about a possible positive case within the program; and then on all the rescheduling efforts he spearheaded to help make the region still have a season.
Even though he said he learned a lot in the past two weeks, he reiterated: “Some of the stuff, I just don’t think we would’ve done it any differently.”
When I talked to each person earlier this week, I asked Shigley, Adams and Sims if any of them thought this football season didn’t really count. Or if, maybe, the season didn’t feel real.
None came close to answering, ‘yes,’ really. Shigley’s team is still in the region title chase, after all. And the season, however truncated and disrupted, is still pushing on.
But a glance at Andrew Jackson illustrates a broader, stranger truth about the 2020 football season that just might mean something beyond the field lines: It’ll be remembered by every person differently — whether it be for its wacky schedules, or its defenselessness against a virus that’s tough to prepare for and tougher to learn from. And for some of the biggest supporters around, it may not be remembered at all.
This story was originally published October 25, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
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