Great Falls football program weathering dip in numbers

Headed into last week’s Lewisville-Great Falls football rivalry, Lions coach Will Mitchell was hoping his team could wear down the Red Devils in the second half. It barely took that long.

Lewisville dressed 33 players for the game, but Great Falls brought just 22, a telling deficit as the game wore on. The 40-13 loss dropped Great Falls to 1-9 on the year.

Coach Kenneth Schofield’s program serves as a metaphor for the Great Falls community, one that’s known past triumph and stability, but is hard down on its luck lately. Population drain is the common factor.

“I understand, and I think our community understands, what we’re looking at here at Great Falls, as far as the numbers,” Schofield said.

Mill boom, and bust

The first mill in Great Falls opened in 1910 after local organizers arranged for Republic Textile Mills Company to take advantage of newly abundant hydroelectric power drawn from the Catawba River. According to the National Register of Historic Places, two more mills opened within the next 13 years. By 1918, Fibre & Fabric, a textiles publication from the time, reported the area’s cotton cloth production at more than a million and a half yards.

Republic built a downtown area with a company store and the Republic Theater, now on the National Register of Historic Places.

It wasn’t too long after that the Great Falls Red Devils began playing football, and playing well. They won the 1934 Class B state championship, according to SCFootballHistory.com, on the back of standout Banks McFadden, who went on to star at Clemson in football and basketball.

After World War II, J.P. Stevens and Company bought out Republic’s mills in Great Falls. The mills employed thousands and remained in operation until 1980. Around the same time, Interstate 77 was stretching from Charlotte to Columbia, bypassing U.S. 21 and Great Falls along the way. Textile companies began to flee the United States and unions for overseas locales or Mexico.

Great Falls was a town built by one industry. Its population has suffered since the mill closings, falling from over 3,500 in 1950 to less than 2,000 in the 2010 census. Today, the mills are hulking brick monoliths, decrepit memories of a sunnier era. The formerly bustling commercial districts are empty. They were made all the gloomier Wednesday by fog rising off the nearby river.

Worst-case scenario

Even in the boom years of the textile mills, Great Falls never overflowed with high school football players. Danny Sawyer coached the 1991 team to a 15-0 season and a 1A state title with just 22 players.

The 2015 team began with 28 players. Not enough by any means and down from recent years, but at least there were substitutes.

That number was quickly whittled down. Two players quit. One of the nine seniors was lost for the year, while another, senior quarterback Pierce Funderburk, missed the first half of the season after breaking his finger. There was a concussion, a dislocated shoulder. Four freshmen joined the Red Devils program this fall, and three are currently on the injured list.

The South Carolina High School League scrapped the eight-quarter rule, which allowed some designated kids to play limited action in both junior varsity JV and varsity games, has made the situation worse. The rule had apparently been abused by some coaches, but was crucial for player development and safety at 1A schools such as Great Falls.

Because the eight-quarter rule was abandoned, Great Falls had to ditch its junior varsity program. Ninth-graders were needed to fill out the varsity roster, but most freshmen are unprepared to play against kids in some cases four years older in mind and body.

Great Falls athletics director John Smith – the school’s legendary basketball coach since 1969 – said the rule is good for 1A football, “so long as you have 37 to 40 players.” For schools below that threshold, it can be harmful.

Whitmire football coach Charlie Jenkins was more blunt when he called the eight-quarter rule “horrible.”

Small schools struggling statewide

Incredibly, Great Falls is not the smallest football-playing school in the SCHSL’s ranks. It’s actually just the 17th smallest, based on 2016-18 enrollment numbers from the SCHSL.

Calhoun Falls, Whitmire and McCormick are just a few of the former mill towns from across the state that also have seen their populations wither away because of economic stagnation and the recent recession.

Yet, they all still put a football team on the field every Friday night. McClellanville’s Lincoln High School, the smallest football school in the state at 106 students, has 19 players this season. The Yellow Jackets have still managed to win four of their 10 games.

Even as Great Falls’ numbers dip, the idea of giving up the football program hasn’t surfaced.

“That’s not part of my discussion when I talk to people,” said Schofield. “My discussion is, ‘How are you gonna make your area more attractive to move families in, to increase the size of your school, to increase the participants in your programs?’ ”

Can’t stop, won’t stop

Despite the challenges, people in the hilly little town haven’t stopped hustling to foment development in the area.

Manufacturing has begun to replace some of the deported textile jobs and Chester County has had recent success courting international firms, including Singapore’s Giti Tire and its promise of 1,700 jobs for a Richburg plant. Great Falls also is beginning to take more advantage of its nearby natural resources, including the Catawba River. Marketing the river’s rapids to whitewater kayakers has gone hand in hand with developing islands dotting the river into state parks.

“We have great hopes,” said Laurens Fort, a Chester County school board member born and raised in Great Falls. Fort said some of the new economic opportunities in the county “are close to Great Falls and we’re expecting and anticipating that we’re going to have a considerable influx of people into the area.”

Great Falls’ football coaching staff has gotten younger as former Red Devils return to the area after college. Schofield added several new assistant coaches this fall, including former players Antonio Artis, Walter Lamar and Terrell Hutchinson, who all played for Schofield on the 2007 team that lost in the 1A state title game.

All of the rookie coaches are younger than 25, and all of them remember a not too distant past when the Red Devils regularly suited up 40-plus players and were annual state title contenders. But as Smith pointed out on Wednesday, there are only 87 boys currently attending the school.

“It’s a little disappointing but I know it will get better,” Lamar said. “It will get back to Great Falls football; the numbers are just hurting us this year.”

Pride Valley

Great Falls already had its lifeblood sapped once; it won’t let go of its high school sports.

“The people of Great Falls live for Great Falls football and Great Falls basketball,” said Lamar. “If they took that away from the community, it would be awful.”

Athletics have long been a conduit from Great Falls to college, football especially. Schofield’s players – especially the ones struggling in school – fulfill study hall hours each week, giving many of them the opportunity to get a college education they may not have pursued otherwise.

And Schofield argues that the sport is a means to creating worthwhile citizens who can handle adversity, such as the kind that has hounded Great Falls the past 35 years.

Great Falls has the SCHSL’s fifth smallest senior class – 43 students according to S.C. Department of Education figures from 2014-15. The coming years should see a return to normalcy for Schofield’s program, though he may never get 40-plus kids out for football again.

Being a mill town has been a blessing and curse for Great Falls. It was painful and confusing when the mills left, leaving behind the wreckage of an economy and a town with its identity ripped out.

But it also produced mill people, the kind of folks that don’t quit just because something is difficult. Even 35 years after the mills’ closure in Great Falls, the town’s football program is still exhibiting that same pluck.

“We’re not holding our head and crying about going out and playing,” said Schofield, whose team fittingly plays its home games at Pride Valley. “We’re looking at going out and playing.”

This story was originally published November 4, 2015 at 8:20 PM with the headline "Great Falls football program weathering dip in numbers."