The HHS varsity football team started off their season with a bang last Thursday night, August 29th, at the field of E.C. Glass, coming home with a win 27-24, with senior Matthew Shiflett, sophomore Devin Medley, and junior Jordan Dove scoring for the team. On Friday, September 6th, the team played their first home game against the judges of John Handley high school. The team put in the hardest work, but came out with a loss of 63-27.

The Friday night home football games are a big event at HHS. With the support of the Red Sea, a multitude of students come out for not only the game, but also the pregame tailgate in the parking lot. The tailgate helps get students hype and excited for the game, with coolers of Red Bull, games of cornhole, music, and lots of cheering.

“I really like hanging out with everyone there. It’s really cool how everyone gets so excited for the game,” senior Katie Wampler said.
Wampler has been attending the tailgates before football games regularly since her freshman year, and is also a member of the Red Sea. The tailgates and Red Sea have been a main part of HHS friday night football games for many years that help bring out crowds to the game and get the student body excited to be a part of the game.

Although the team came out with a loss, there were still some good aspects to the game. Sophomore Devin Medley had three touchdowns, and senior Jalen Crawford also had a touchdown for the team.

“We did well on taking the ball down the field and we got some good runs and some good passes in. We did pretty well running the ball though,” Medley said.

This upcoming week is a bye week for the football team, and they plan to use this week to their advantage to improve their playing and work as a team to get better.

“We have improved since the beginning of the season, but I think we will continue to get better and work at it. Some things we’ll probably work on this week are definitely blocking, tackling, basically all the fundamentals. Tackling especially we will work on. Over this bye week we are going to try to improve on basically everything actually,” Medley said.

The team has another home game next Friday, September 20th, against Liberty Bedford.

“Once we work on things like tackling and blocking, we’ll be a lot better and I think we can still have a really good season,” sophomore Abner Johnson said. “We still have potential to be pretty good this season.”