Plant City High School’s football team wasn’t big on special Homecoming traditions when Todd Long coached there.
He’s the athletic director at Durant now, though, where the football team does do something different for the occasion.
Most people probably think of Durant as a strictly navy blue-and-gold program. After all, those are two colors that the school uses for, well, just about everything. Branding, uniforms, websites — you name it, it’s covered in navy and gold.
That begs a question: How do those green jerseys fit in with the overall look of the program? I talked to Long about it some time ago, and it turns out that the color is more integrated into the school’s tradition than one would think.
“A lot of people think that our colors are Vegas and navy blue, and they are, but kelly green is also considered a school color,” Long says.
Besides on the gridiron, the color is most prominent during any given spirit week. As with many high schools, each class has its own identifying color. For Durant juniors, theirs is kelly green.
On the field, the team takes its cues from Notre Dame. There’s nothing about the overall uniform design that changes, besides the fact that the jerseys are a different color. The players all seem to love the feeling of pulling that kelly green over their heads and getting ready to put on a show for the Homecoming crowd.
And, as someone with a rooting interest in the Fighting Irish, I hope Durant’s green jerseys aren’t cursed like Notre Dame’s. I’m pretty sure that they aren’t cursed, though, knowing that Durant’s first win of the 2013 season was a 26-0 Homecoming beatdown on Gaither.
“They started wearing those, I’d say, eight or nine years ago,” Long says. “The green was always an official school color, but nobody ever really emphasizes it. It seems like, once our football team started doing that, other teams in other sports started putting green in the jerseys.”
Strawberry Crest, another school that redesigned its uniforms for the 2014 season, doesn’t have an extra, somewhat hidden color in its visual branding.
Typically, a team that wears black or white jerseys, the Chargers have been known to break out a set of reds. The fans could get a look at some new reds tonight, if a hint head coach John Kelly dropped to me holds up.
Apart from that, Crest has one extra Homecoming tradition that pertains to the football team — specifically, the jerseys. On the Friday of Homecoming week, the Crest faculty and staff wear Charger football jerseys over their clothes to get hyped for that night’s game.
“That’s a neat show of support from the staff, the faculty and administration, towards the football game and the football program as a whole,” Kelly says.
When I was in high school, we didn’t have anything like that. There were only two sets of uniforms, and the only time I can recall seeing the faculty in jerseys was when there was a general sports theme for one day. None of them wore Lake Region jerseys.
Maybe the closest any big group came to putting on a Thunder uniform was in my senior year, but that was when the entire Varsity baseball team dressed up as the head coach/athletic director/lunch detention overseer and stayed in character all day. That was hilarious, and I encourage any local high school teams with interesting head coaches to do the same — in good taste — when the opportunity arises.
Cougars and Chargers — have an awesome Homecoming weekend. Let’s play some football!
