Cougars traveling for football practice too

Jackson Central-Merry’s football team is accustomed to moving around.

In their fourth season since returning from having been shut down for five years, the Cougars have played a handful of “home games” at the old Lambuth University football field which is typically used as the soccer field for Madison Academic.

Otherwise, their games have either been true road games or pseudo-home games in which they will play a team from outside Jackson at one of the other three Jackson-Madison County Schools stadiums in town – North Side, South Side and Liberty.

But since construction has begun on the eventual JCM football stadium next to Oman Arena, they’ve lost their practice field.

“We travel for all our games, and now we’re traveling for all our practices,” said head coach Erit Turner with a laugh after practice on Wednesday. “But that’s OK because we’ve got a good crew to help us out.

“While we’re lifting in the weightroom at school, a couple of our coaches and our managers will go on to the practice field and get things set up.”

The practice field Turner mentioned is the old football field at the former Old Hickory Academy campus on Hollywood Drive. It’s been used a number of different ways since OHA transformed into University School of Jackson and moved to its current location on McClellan Drive, including as JCM’s soccer field for a few years.

“I wanted a good, stable place for our guys to get work in that’s 100 yards long,” Turner said. “And this works for us.”

Turner likes to see the effort his team is putting in on the practice field. Two-and-a-half weeks removed from the two-week dead period where players and coaches weren’t allowed to have any contact, JCM’s head coach said his team has gotten a good amount of rust off and is excited to see what it does.”

“We got some good work in today,” Turner told the players when they huddled up at the end of practice and going over some of the subtle aspects of the game they worked on to refine their own strategies. “And we just need to get a little better day after day.”

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news