OPINION: Starting youth sports could produce big dividends for JMCSS athletics

Over a decade ago, while doing a story with former Milan High football coach Jeff Morris and McKenzie High football coach Wade Comer, I asked both of them why their schools were consistent winners.

At the time, McKenzie was a couple years removed from their first trip to play in the state championship in 2007 and were usually ranked in the top five in the state in their classification and were routinely making runs to the quarterfinals and semifinals of the playoffs if they weren’t making it to Murfreesboro at the time.

Milan was in the middle of its last extended run of postseason success in which Morris led the Bulldogs to the state championship game four out of five years, and the one year they didn’t make it to the championship game, they ended a week early in the state semifinals.

So they had a good idea of what continued success in the postseason took.

One unexpected reason they both gave were they felt they benefited greatly from the fact that the people of both of their towns were heavily invested in sports – particularly football.

Both towns had solid youth football programs that developed a love for the game in the boys that played.

Then in upper elementary and middle school, the boys who enjoyed the game worked on the fundamentals and really refined how they carried the ball or tackled or ran routes or blocked.

Then when they got to high school, there was a little tweaking that Morris and Comer had to do, but for the most part, they could leave that with their freshman football coach while the rest of their coaching staffs worked intensely with their sophomores, juniors and seniors to hone their skills even more, build up their strength and conditioning and put together quality game plans each week for their opponents.

Long before Jackson-Madison County Schools ever thought of hiring Marlon King as its superintendent, King had a similar philosophy when he was leading the school system in Haywood County and revamped the head football coach at Haywood into one that would not only coach the high school football team but would coordinate among all of the coaches within the school system to essentially ensure each team at every level became a quality feeder team for the team above it.

While there is some success in JMCSS at the statewide level consistently – South Side basketball (both genders), Madison soccer and cross country are probably the most consistent examples of this – there’s a lot that can be done.

Shemon Reaves and Jason Compton are two people that deserve a lot of credit for taking action to seeing a need and meeting it for two sports in the district to possibly see a good bit of success in the years to come.

Compton, who is on the school board and is on the board’s athletic committee, allowed for JMCSS to start middle school baseball at the place where he usually works his day job as the director of the West Tennessee Healthcare Sportsplex.

Compton credits Reaves for taking the proverbial bull by the horns for elementary basketball that officially started this week.

“We first discussed elementary basketball in a committee meeting in October, and I don’t even remember for sure when, but at some point I mentioned it to Dr. Reaves,” Compton said. “And then in a meeting a couple months ago, I brought elementary basketball back up again with the hopes of getting it going during basketball season next year.

“But I found out then that he already had basketball going to start this year and have it for a few weeks at the end of the year, which is phenomenal.”

How many times are really good ideas presented to people who have the authority to make something happen, and most of the time – for good reason – the initial answer is to wait until next year or next fall or after this fiscal year ends before trying to start it?

Reaves and Compton have said they’re not having any of that.

To get something going, you have to start it. Both men said it’s time to get athletics started for the younger ages in JMCSS.

Now will this automatically mean we’ll get more state championship-caliber teams starting next month at Spring Fling because of this?

Of course not. But as these student-athletes get older and better at their game and begin competing for Jackson Central-Merry, Liberty, Madison, North Side and South Side, hopefully the coaches there will see less of a need to teach fundamentals and begin to grow their teams into teams that compete for district championships, region championships and more after that.

And it has to start somewhere. Hopefully a decade from now when JMCSS teams are winning their way into state championship conversations, we’ll be able to look back at the spring of 2023 and the work by Reaves, Compton and their teams and where a lot of it started to trend upward.

Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram @Editorbrandon.