One Lowco
Though it pains me to say it, it’s been more often than not that football season was already becoming a distant memory in the Lowcountry — and sometimes one better forgotten — by the time the crowning weekend of the season arrived.
Let’s face it: With rare exception, we’ve already flipped off the Friday night lights, stuffed ourselves full of turkey, and pivoted toward basketball season before the state’s public school powers have even punched their tickets to state.
I’m not taking cheap shots, I’m just stating facts. Since I arrived in the Lowco in 2005 as a pup reporter coming in hot from Kansas, I’ve covered plenty of SCISA state championship games, and more than a few postgame celebrations for the home teams, but I’ve only seen four Beaufort County public school teams survive into December.
In two decades.
Sure, we got spoiled by Beaufort High’s magical run to back-to-back championship games, and the second washed away the nasty taste of unfulfilled dreams lingering from the first. The Eagles’ triumph over Powdersville in the 2022 SCHSL 3A championship salved the sting of a lopsided defeat to South Pointe in the SCHSL 4A title game a year earlier, and ended a 77-year drought since a SCHSL state title resided in Beaufort County.
Before that, we went wild for the Bluffton Bobcats in 2011 and bananas for the Beaufort Eagles in 2008, but both came home empty-handed.
That’s why you’ll find entrenched Lowcountry high school football fans pulling hard for Hampton County and Bamberg-Ehrhardt.
This area has always lurked in the shadows, the product of a unique media market that falls too far from Charleston but on the wrong side of the state line for Savannah, forever relegated to secondary status. But Beaufort County has it good compared with more rural, inland areas like Hampton and Bamberg — two of the poorest counties in an impoverished state — where the TV cameras are rarely rolling and the small-town newspapers are fighting for their lives.
These are places where everything stops on Friday nights, and for a few hours, everything is perfect. As long as the home team wins.
And they’ve both won. A lot. But not the big one.
Bamberg-Ehrhardt has only one state championship in its rich history, way back in 1990. The Red Raiders have been to the mountaintop and come back unfulfilled four times since, but they can end a 35-year wait against Lamar.
No public school football team from Hampton County has ever brought home a state title, and they’ve only been this close once before, when Arlo Hill’s Wade Hampton High School squad lost a 6-0 heartbreaker to Abbeville.
The Wade Hampton Red Devils and Estill Gators both ended their histories without a championship, but three years after a merger many said would never work, the Hurricane they combined to form is storming to state for a date with the Strom Thurmond Rebels.
There are numerous reasons to support the Hurricanes and Red Raiders, whether you’re a Bluffton or Hilton Head fan who wants to be able to say you beat a state champion this season or just root for the Lower State against the Upper State (duh). But the biggest one is because their struggles are our struggles, and their breakthroughs are our breakthroughs.
We are one Lowco.
Justin Jarrett is the sports editor of The Island News and is the founder of Lowco Sports. He has a passion for sports and community journalism and a questionable sense of humor.
