By CHRIS BABB | Special to arkadelphian.com
Not many towns – especially in Arkansas – can lay claim to having two successful college football programs and a successful high school program. Arkadelphia can.
I’m not talking about a successful season here and there. I’m talking about sustained success.
Last weekend, all three of the football teams in town – AHS, HSU and OBU – lost their respective games. To illustrate the success of the programs over the last several seasons, that was the first time since the weekend of October 7-8, 2016, that had occurred. Almost 10 seasons.
A lot of weekends of football – a whole lot. To help make it more clear, just consider this: Henderson State has played 88 games, Ouachita has played 90 games and Arkadelphia High School has played 115 games since that October weekend in 2016.
When you take into consideration that most of those games were played on the same weekends, that’s a lot of weekends where all three teams had a 50-50 chance of losing a games and none of those weekends saw all three end up on the wrong side in the win-loss column.
It makes sense when you look at another set of numbers. In that stretch, Arkadelphia has won three state championships, four more trips to the state semifinals and multiple conference championships. Ouachita has won seven GAC titles and Henderson State has won three. Harding is the only other GAC team outside of Ouachita and Henderson to have won a GAC football championship since the conference began just over a decade ago.
That’s pretty remarkable.
So, what do you do when your favorite team loses. There are a few options and fans cover the spectrum of believing what the appropriate response is to a loss. (Sidenote/Soapbox moment: it rarely ever just comes down to one play or officiating decision, no matter when that play or call occurs.)
Full disclosure (which won’t surprise those who know my career path): I almost always feel for the players and coaches after losses as opposed to examining the game to see what different decision could be made by the said players and coaches.
I’ve worked with coaches and players closely in some aspect for the majority of my professional life and I don’t claim to be an objective observer when it comes to my view of a team and a coaching staff.
I do think that my perspective during my career has put me in a position to see that the players and coaches spend an exponentially greater number of hours throughout the week preparing than those of us have who may just see the team when the lights come on. It matters more to them – as it should.
So, what do you do with that? In our situation locally, I choose to view myself as being fortunate to be able to experience this stretch of success.
If you have followed the Badgers, the Tigers or the Reddies for an extended period of time, you know that long-term success isn’t permanent. All three of the programs have experienced lean stretches of seasons. Those are no fun.
Anybody who is around 20 years old isn’t really old enough to have experienced any of these teams struggle for more than a season or two…and even then, the “struggle” means the occasional season just over .500. Again, that’s pretty remarkable.
We all want our teams to win every weekend and we’ve gotten to the point in our small swath of land in southwest Arkansas that it actually happens that way most weekends. Rex Nelson is in his 42nd season of play-by-play for Ouachita football. In the group message thread the broadcast crew has, the common thought over the last 17 seasons of winning football has been to enjoy the moment because it hasn’t always been that way and it’s not guaranteed that it will be like that forever.
Although for those of us in Arkadelphia, it sure seems hard to comprehend that thought. And that sure is a better place to be than the alternative.
Here’s to another winning streak for all three of our teams…well, until two of them face each other the third Saturday of November.
That’s another column.