No stage was too big for Northwestern football in 2010. Those Trojans are coming home
Nothing was too big for the 2010 Northwestern football team.
Not ESPN, which aired Northwestern’s home-opening win against rival South Pointe. Not Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, where the same team punctuated a 15-0 season and celebrated winning the city of Rock Hill’s ninth state championship.
The Trojans, stacked with FBS-level recruits, weren’t even too big for each other.
“Them cats knew they were good,” former assistant coach William “Q-Rock” Cureton told The Herald earlier this week. “They knew they were good. And they still put in the work. And then you saw what the ultimate prize was: We went 15-0.”
Those Trojans will be back together soon enough. And they’ll meet at home.
The 2010 Northwestern football team will be honored on Friday night in District Three Stadium, at halftime of the Trojans’ 7:30 p.m. game against Indian Land. The party will start before then, though, with food and drinks and pictures and trophies and stories by the gallon starting an hour before kickoff in the stadium, Northwestern athletic director Jimmy Duncan said.
“That was an incredible year,” said Duncan, who wasn’t the school’s AD then but knows about the team through its lore. “You’re talking about some heavy hitters on that team.”
Who are some of those guys? Northwestern’s head coach at the time and since-retired Rock Hill football fixture Jimmy Wallace listed off some memories associated with that team without needing a second thought earlier this week. But he didn’t want to name any single person if he couldn’t name them all, he said. (“I’m 71 years old, and I don’t wanna forget a soul,” he said. “Not one of them. Every one of those players were important to that team. And we had 44 seniors when we started.”)
So many of those guys on that team can’t not be mentioned: There was Justin Worley, the team’s quarterback who went on to Tennessee and was named the 2010-11 Gatorade National Player of the Year. There was Robert Joseph, the wide receiver who still holds the record for most passes caught in a season (150) in South Carolina high school football history. There was Rod Byers (Clemson) and Gerald Dixon (USC) and Collins Mauldin and Chris Long and so many more.
Wallace has a fair point. There are too many players to list.
But certain memories stick out to the old coach.
Like how his team played in two state championships in the two previous years and lost both of them before winning the one in 2010: “I heard (Clemson) coach Dabo Swinney once say, ‘We played 45 times in three years.’ Well, we played 60. Four scrimmages, one jamboree and then all the games leading up to the state championship game. That’s a lot of football.”
Or how hot that fateful season-opener against South Pointe on ESPN was: “We played at 4 o’clock and it was 100 degrees on that field. 130 on that turf. And it was packed. It was a great football game. I guess you don’t remember the scores of the games, but you remember the relationships that were developed between the coaches and the players, the coaches and the coaches, and the players and the players. And that’s what makes the game so amazing.”
Q-Rock said he stopped by Rock Hill restaurant Wing Bonz a few days ago and saw a picture of Worley, the team’s triumphant quarterback, walking around the field with that year’s state championship trophy. A flood of memories came to Q-Rock in that moment, he said.
“There were so many great young men on that team,” he said, his memories and stories and feelings easily accessible, as if untouched by time. “They were just fun to be around. Their teachers wanted to be around them. The coaches wanted to be around them. And doggone it — Q-Rock wanted to be around them.”
They wanted to be around each other, too. And they soon will be again.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated where the 2010 state championship football game was played. Northwestern won the title in Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia. The error has been fixed.
This story was originally published August 25, 2021 at 2:32 PM.
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