After midnight, Clover football gets ahead

Around 11 p.m. Thursday night, I kissed my fiancee good night and rolled over... and out of the bed, down the hall, and out the door after quietly locking up.

Into the car. Windows lowered and radio volume nudged up. A tall coffee and a SunDrop were the only beverages that could keep me awake at an hour in which I’m normally reaching the hundreds in sheep-counting.

I had to be at Clover for the first minutes of the high school football season. Cresting SC-55, the glow of floodlighting marked the spot, like a Christmas tree in the dark.

Started by former coach Jet Turner, midnight football practice has become a tradition at Clover, one continued by third-year head coach Chad Smith.

“It’s crazy,” said quarterback Noah Lindsay. “Nobody else is doing it. We’re trying to be different from everybody else.”

That does seem to be one consistent with the Clover program these days; certainly nobody in 4A football runs an offense like the Blue Eagles’ modified wing-T, and few other public schools in the Carolinas have three turf fields from which to choose. Likely fewer schools would have had a crowd in the hundreds milling around the boundaries of the practice field waiting for high school football season to officially commence Thursday night/Friday morning.

The signal to begin – fireworks in the parking lot – spouted into the dark at midnight. But because of lightning flashes in the area, the start of practice was delayed about 20 minutes.

While the Blue Eagles technically began practice Friday at around 12:20 a.m., teams in South Carolina can’t hit anyone or anything until next week. The official start of practice was a bit of an anticlimax, akin to the accidentally premature fireworks show.

“When you’ve been doing this stuff all summer and you come out the first two days and you can’t hit anything,” Smith said, “it’s very frustrating, especially for the type of team that we are. But at the same time we can get a lot of reps in, try and get the kids in shape pretty good, and go from there.”

Clover ran 36 periods, each five minutes long. Smith checked off the completed sessions on his clipboard. Clover players hopped around in the muggy but forgiving night air. They were ready for this practice, because potential jet lag was stiff-armed throughout the day.

“Sleep as much as you can during the day,” said tailback Willy Clark.

“Not be out in the hot sun,” said Lindsay, who watched movies all Thursday leading up to the practice. The last movie he watched was his favorite, “Man on Fire.” It’s a Denzel Washington save-the-day, shoot-em-up flick (a very good watch) that fired Lindsay up for the midnight practice.

“It gets you hype!” he said.

All through the three-hour practice heat lightning flashed like distant paparazzi. Players and coaches, but mostly fans, watched the flashes nervously, remembering last year’s rainy deluge that mired the 2014 season’s first practice.

A big crowd was scattered around the practice field for the first hour, at which point folks that likely had to work in the morning gradually headed for their cars. Clusters of teenagers stuck around well into the night, but even they had largely dissipated by 2 a.m. All were appreciated by the players and coaches.

“It’s really amazing,” said Smith, who ran midnight practices at his previous stop, Easley, for three years. He admits borrowing the idea from Clover. “We had pretty good turnouts but Clover kind of takes it to another level. It’s really like a little social event. People look forward to it.”

One man, Melvin Mullis, stuck it out longer than most with his grandson, McCarter, who is visiting for the summer from Minnesota. They were watching one of Mullis’ other grandsons, an offensive lineman named Will. The reason for Melvin Mullis to be up so late was simple.

“I just like the sport, and just to support them,” he said. “You just look around at how many people are here, you look at all the young kids out here, they want to support their school and I think it’s great.”

Now retired, Mullis didn’t have to be at work in the morning like many of the parents that stayed and supported their kids in the first hours of the 2015 season. But he did have an appointment Friday at 8:30 a.m. with his hair stylist.

“I had a couple of people tell me today I needed to keep that appointment,” Mullis said. “I don’t know what that meant.”

Back in the car and headed home around 3 a.m., the caffeine wore off quickly. But with the windows down, the country air finally cooling and a nice song on the stereo, it was easy to enjoy driving home under a full moon. Clover football has a tough slog ahead of it this fall, especially in a typically brutal Region 3-4A. But for one day, the Blue Eagles were ahead of everyone.

This story was originally published July 31, 2015 at 2:48 PM with the headline "After midnight, Clover football gets ahead."