CALEDONIA — Michael Putt and his friends heard the stories.

Growing up in Caledonia in the 1980s, Putt was well aware of the players who had become legends for the school’s football program: Tommy Kidd. Johnny Knight. Lynn Dawkins.

“We wanted to go out there and emulate those guys,” Putt said.

Midway through his freshman season in 1987, Putt got his chance, taking over as Caledonia’s starting quarterback. As a junior, he led the team to one of its best seasons ever amid a strong high school career.

“We were fortunate that we had a good cycle while I was there, and we had success during those years,” Putt said.

But he knows it hasn’t always been that way. Even in that standout junior season, Caledonia’s record was a strong but hardly dominating 7-4. The following year, the team went 2-8; the year after that, it went 0-10.

For nearly 65 years, that’s been Caledonia: a program with a rich history — even when the wins aren’t coming.

“Caledonia football has had a lot of tradition, though we haven’t always had success,” Putt said.

Getting off the ground

That tradition dates back to 1957, the year Dale Darnell came home.

After Darnell’s brother died while attending Mississippi State, the siblings’ father always wanted Darnell to return to Caledonia. Darnell received his teaching credential from MSU and spent three years as an assistant football coach at Moss Point, where the Tigers didn’t lose a single game. Darnell went on to Winona, where he enjoyed similar success as an assistant under John Wright with star quarterback Billy Stacy.

Once, Darnell’s son Bill recalled, Stacy got a tooth knocked out during a game at Greenwood, 30 miles west on Highway 82. Darnell drove his star player back to Winona, a city he still didn’t know well, to have a dentist put the tooth back in. Stacy did his best to give his coach directions, but Darnell accidentally drove his car down four flights of stairs and through the dentist’s office. (No word on the fate of Stacy’s tooth.)

Stacy went on to star for Mississippi State before playing five years at defensive back in the NFL. Darnell, meanwhile, finally came home at the urging of Caledonia’s principal, who lived across the street from Darnell’s father.

Darnell was given the chance to start the first Caledonia football program, but to do it, he had to coach baseball and boys and girls basketball — all for a salary of $2,000 a year.

Half the players were Ole Miss fans who wanted their team to be called the Rebels, but the state of Mississippi forbade that.

“And so one of these players came up and said, ‘Look, what about Confederates?’” Bill Darnell said. “That means a band of people together. That’s what it meant.”

The name stuck until July 2020, when the Lowndes County School District board unanimously voted to remove it.

“I feel like it was time for a change,” current Caledonia football coach Michael Kelly told The Dispatch.

But at the time of the program’s founding, the name was apt, Bill Darnell said. A close-knit group of players wanted a football team so badly they all but put it together themselves.

When it was clear playing without goalposts in the outfield of the school’s baseball park and borrowing bleachers from Columbus Air Force Base wasn’t going to work, Darnell and his players built a new stadium.

Darnell bulldozed the approved ground behind the old gymnasium and planted the grass for the field. The school purchased a few bleachers and set them up against the back of the gym, but the visitors’ bleachers were constructed by local brick masons out of concrete blocks.

Rather than changing in the old agriculture building, the team dug a rudimentary dressing room under the gym, using insecticide smoke to clean out a termite infestation before lining the area with chicken wire and building lockers.

The school supplied light fixtures, and a donor supplied eight poles — 100 feet each — to illuminate the field. Without underground wiring, players shinnied up the beams to hook up the electricity.

“Can you imagine that today: a kid in school climbing the light pole?” Bill Darnell said.

Tragic losses shape program

Still, there were growing pains as the program built itself up — and tragedies along the way.

At the outset, many Caledonia players had never even seen a football game — they didn’t own televisions, and the sport was new to that medium, anyway.

During one early game, Caledonia punted, and an opposing returner signaled for a fair catch. A Caledonia player flattened him, unaware of the rule.

“You didn’t tell us about that, Coach,” the player complained to Darnell.

Caledonia won two games in 1957 and two in 1958, losing 11 times combined between the two years. Soon, Darnell moved on to become an assistant under Billy Brewer at S.D. Lee High School, and Caledonia got new coaches every two years: Ira Smith, then Sanford Powell, then Ganus Harrison.

In 1965, the third year of Harrison’s tenure, a shocking death shook up everything. Bill Darnell was in eighth grade when it played out on the field, right in front of him.

In a game against Kennedy (Alabama) High School, Caledonia senior Robert Holder collided with an opposing player.

He was knocked unconscious, and he never woke up. Holder was transferred to a hospital in Birmingham, where he died a few days later.

“That killed football right here for a while,” Bill Darnell said. “Those people didn’t want their kids out there.”

Holder’s death wasn’t the only tragic loss suffered at Caledonia around that time. Shortly after graduating in 1970, Charlie “Chick” Egger — who teamed up with Bill Darnell on the school’s first undefeated ninth-grade team in 1966 — died suddenly.

Bill Darnell, David Curtis and Carey “Hoot” Garriga honored Egger’s memory by establishing an award — and making a plaque — for the best athlete at the school each year. The award was named the “Screaming Eagle” after the piercing whistle Egger and his friends would make by blowing through their cupped hands, and it’s now given out every year by the school in remembrance of Egger.

“Charlie was probably the best athlete to ever play anything at Caledonia,” Bill Darnell said.

Coaches through the years

Over the years, there were plenty of other Caledonia greats — and standout coaches who brought the best in them.

Bill Darnell’s final coach of his high school career — he had three — was Earnest Bigham, who led Caledonia to a 3-6 record in Darnell’s senior year. The following season, 1970, he took the ’Feds to 7-3, including a win in a bowl game — then in place of playoff brackets — in Maben.

It was the last time Bigham coached at Caledonia.

“As usual, nobody would get off their pocket book and pay anything, so he ended up at Lafayette County High School,” Bill Darnell said.

Caledonia went through eight football coaches in the next nine years. Mike Justice, who coached the 1977 team, and Chuck Friend, who led the squad in 1979, each went on to win championships — but not in Caledonia. Justice won in Calhoun City, Louisville and Brandon before going to Alabama and winning a title there; Friend later won state at Neshoba Central.

After Friend departed, Grady Prevost posted a 21-39 record in six years at Caledonia. Then Larry Wright, a National Guardsman who doubled as a coach and tripled as a teacher, took over.

Wright coached Putt throughout his high school career, and the quarterback recalled a coach with military discipline who still wasn’t afraid to put his arm on a player’s shoulder in support.

“I thought he was a great balance between someone who demanded a lot of you but at the same time let you know how much he appreciated you as a player and also as a person,” Putt said.

But with the football team failing to post a winning season between 1989 and 2004, another sport captivated attention at Caledonia. The baseball team, coached for many years by Tommy Smith — for who the Cavaliers’ stadium is currently named — took precedent for good reason. Smith won state titles in 1976 and 1978 and finished second eight more times.

Occasionally, the success of the baseball program led to conflict with the football team. At halftime of one football game, Bill Darnell — serving as an assistant — was confronted by the ’Feds’ baseball coaches. They were mad that Darnell had sent a star baseball player on a safety blitz three times in the first half, worried the player might get hurt.

Darnell heard them out. Then, in the second half, he ran the blitz six more times.

But the programs weren’t always at odds. Darnell helped out with baseball, too, as the team produced star college player after star college player: Bobby Taylor, Josh Johnson, Danny Henry.

“I think the tradition of success with baseball was just more than football,” Putt said.

A ‘band of brothers’

Bill Darnell still remembers his last game.

It was against Mooreville, which fielded a fullback bigger than Darnell, who was playing nose guard. On fourth-and-1 with less than a minute left, the Troopers gave him the ball. Darnell swam between the center and the guard and met the bruising back head on in the hole. He cast a glimpse to the side, where he could see he was behind the first-down marker. Eventually, his teammates came over to finish the play as Caledonia held on for the win.

It was that kind of camaraderie that has come to define the program over the years, said Darnell, now in his final year as a Caledonia alderman after 42 years of service on the board. His nephew William is a candidate in the June election, another reminder of the passage of time.

So was Dale Darnell’s death in January 2019 at age 87. At his funeral, players from that first Caledonia team in 1957 came from near and far to pay their respects in a “tremendous” memorial.

Putt said his teams were a “band of brothers” who played hard together for the name gracing the front of the jerseys they donned.

“I really think that we were fortunate enough to play with guys who really tried to emulate that in all that we did,” he said.

Though his children went on to attend Heritage Academy — where his son Carter also starred at quarterback — Putt has done his best, as has Darnell, to keep up with the town he grew up in.

That applies to all sports. Caledonia has won recent titles in golf, tennis and weightlifting and makes perennial playoff appearances in baseball, softball, and basketball.

Of course, football is always on Putt’s mind. His 30-year high school reunion is coming up soon, and he’s still following Kelly and the current edition of the Cavaliers.

And make no mistake: Putt thinks the future is bright.

“I’ve really been proud of what (Kelly’s) accomplished and is continuing to accomplish,” he said.

Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.