REUNIONS

RISK TAKERS, PLAYMAKERS

FIRST JA GRADUATING CLASS CELEBRATES 40 YEARS AS ALUMNI

As ninth graders, representatives of the Class of 1982 approached the Jackson Academy Board of Trustees and made a request: Let us have a high school. During their ninth grade year, momentum and camaraderie were at an all-time high as Jackson Academy moved through the recovery process after the April flood of 1979. But without a high school, these fully invested freshmen were on their way to finish high school elsewhere because JA ended at ninth grade.

According to the board chair at that time, Newt Harrison, the students were so enamored with their school that they appealed to the board of Trustees. Their maturity and rationale for their request impressed the board. “We promised we would return to be the first graduating class,” remarked Joel Brown ’82, quoted in “Jackson Academy: The First Fifty Years 1959-2009.”

RISK TAKERS

Both students and the board took a risk. Ninth graders would need to leave for tenth grade and return to JA in eleventh. When they returned, they would be charting new territory, becoming the first students, for example, to have a high school football team, a prom, and eventually graduation. The board was taking a risk because it needed to assemble teachers, have enough students to operate a high school, and secure space. Plus, there was pushback from area schools that sought to include these same students in their enrollments.

PRESSING ON

JA’s Raider Rampage publication headlined in December 1979: “JA Will Have A High School.” Much like then track coach and poet Bubba Cox would have said, they decided to “press on.” In a footnote to his 1982 poem, “The Dust of Yesterday,” (see page 1 for full poem) Cox noted, “I hope that we will all remember that nothing that is worthwhile comes easily and then press on to be all that we can be…” Although he was referring to the JA’s boys track season, his comment applied to JA’s broader situation.

SOARING AND REACHING THE TOP

No place was “pressing on” more evident than with the first high school football team. In the fall of 1980, Coach Ron Jurney and Coach David Culpepper, both Millsaps College graduates and former athletes, led a team of 18 with no seniors. This first team had a respectable showing of four wins and five losses while focusing on

fundamentals. “It was not bad for a team that didn’t have experienced players,” Jurney said, noting also that the team relied on equipment handed down from a college.

A blend of “good team chemistry,” experience from their first season, and ratcheting up training led coaches to foresee positive things on the horizon. “We felt good about the season,” Jurney said about the 1981-82 year. Others shared that feeling.

The season opener against Union Academy, which had a strong team, brought out the news media.

Running back and outside linebacker Larry Methvin, now of Longview, Texas, remembers Jurney and Culpepper’s training program that propelled the tight-knit team to a 10-win regular season. “The coaches ran a tough 2-a-day practice. Practices were like boot camp. We did not miss a Tuesday hitting,” he said. “They wanted to get us winning as quickly as they could. Fairly recent college players themselves, our coaches were serious about how we operated and were awesome mentors for football and life. They had the attention of every player.” Risks taken by returning JA students, plus transferring students who gave up assured positions at other schools to join a new team, paid off. The Raiders advanced to the playoffs, where the team experienced its first and only loss.

A fond memory for JA students and Coach Jurney occurred after the tenth win. One of the transferring students had experienced a football tradition of shaving players’ heads, and a few JA team members adopted that practice. One player approached Coach Jurney with a question: “If we go undefeated, will you shave your head?” After the tenth win, “I didn’t have to cut it,” Journey laughed. “They butchered me!” Students schoolwide were delighted and speak of that memory even today.

Methvin recalls that the camaraderie was not just among the football team; it extended throughout the high school. He said that students who “were good friends, laughed, and got along well as a class” enjoyed the small atmosphere. Watching from a grade below, Bronwyn Caves Burford ’83 agrees.

“The classes in the new high school were very close,” Burford said. “We knew that it took those coming back for the school to have enough students to create a high school. They took a risk returning to a school that was getting its high school started. Other students came to the new high school in their senior year, and some in their junior years.”

EVERYTHING WAS A FIRST!

JA’s first graduating class experienced a senior year to remember, and in doing so, they helped create a high school experience to remember. In addition to the winning football team, JA took the swimming championship and the boys’ track championship. They participated in the school’s first prom, helped create JA’s fight song, and elected the first Mr. and Miss JA. They started the high school student council. The newly-formed National Honor Society inducted its first seniors and the new Mu Alpha Theta honored math students. JA fielded the school’s first baseball and softball teams.

Among the “flood kin,” as JA’s history book called JA families of that era, the Class of 1982 left a legacy that propelled JA to be a school to watch. “If it had not been for them (the students who left and came back for their junior or senior years when the high school opened), we would not have had a high school,” said Burford.