William Love, a former school board member and not part of the vote, gave a deposition for Rodemaker’s lawsuit. The Black board members voted again to let Rodemaker go, against the recommendation of Cason, who is also Black. “Whites have made decisions on behalf of the Black community for years, but when a white man is dismissed all of the sudden hell breaks loose,” he said. Floyd Rose, a longtime pastor and civil rights leader, reminded the Black board members that Black voters had put them there and urged them to reaffirm their decision. Many pleaded for Rodemaker to keep his job.

10, 2020, the townspeople packed the 900-seat Valdosta High School Performing Arts Center, selected because it was large enough for the expected crowd. Still, there was enough support for Rodemaker to force the board to revisit its decision at a meeting a few weeks later. After some lean years for the Wildcats, he reckoned that if the team was going to lift its game, the Touchdown Club had to do the same. In 2002, Nelson joined the board of the Touchdown Club, a now-70-year-old booster club. How big a deal is it to be a Wildcat? When a famed coach died suddenly in 1996, 7,000 mourners packed Cleveland Field to pay their respects as his body, dressed in the Wildcats’ gold and black and cradling a football, lay in repose on the 50-yard line. “It kills me I’ll never get over it,” said Nelson, who carried his firstborn son home from the hospital in a Wildcats helmet. His only regret was that he never got to be a Valdosta Wildcat. Nelson, 65, said that he has never considered the loss a tragedy.

That was the end of the horse and might have been the end of Nelson if the doctors hadn’t taken off his gangrenous arm at the elbow. He got the nickname after his horse stepped in front of a pickup truck with him in the saddle. Not many people know that Nub Nelson’s real first name is Michael. Poignantly, this racially split community seems unsure whether it can come together even around football.įor now, Valdosta is plumb out of coaches, with its current head coach on administrative leave after he was caught on tape whispering about a recruiting slush fund and the previous one, a white man, alleging racial discrimination after he was fired, though a five-touchdown loss to a local rival can’t be dismissed as a factor. So the Wildcat faithful can only bemoan the scandal suddenly unfolding before them, one involving mysterious hirings and firings, rampant rumors and allegations of dirty dealing by some of the South’s most famous college coaches. The Valdosta Wildcats are undoubtedly one of America’s most successful high school football teams, with more than 900 victories, two dozen state titles and its star players seemingly on a conveyor belt to football meccas like Georgia and Alabama. There is no joy in Titletown, as this South Georgia city calls itself.

Greatest football story ever told