The Valdosta High School football tradition is the most well represented in the nation. The Wildcats have accumulated six national championships, 24 state championships, and 900-plus wins since the football program began. This amount of success helped the city of Valdosta win SportsCenter’s 2008 Title Town contest.
However, the success of the Valdosta football program has been diminished since the turn of the century. In the early 2000’s, the Lowndes High School Vikings became the top dog of the area, winning three state titles in a four-year span. All the while, the once proud Valdosta Wildcats had fallen far from the top, even posting a program worst 1-9 season in 2006.
The decade that followed saw a Valdosta team that was average at best.
Coming into the 2016 season, the Wildcats were a relative unknown and an inexperienced team, having lost their head coach and a large group of seniors the year before. Former defensive coordinator Alan Rodemaker was appointed head coach, and he had to break in a whole new group of starters. Everyone was skeptical, and nobody knew what the 2016 season would hold for the Wildcats.
Certainly, nobody thought it would end with a state championship. That is nobody except Rodemaker and the entire Valdosta High football team. For the first time since 1998, the Valdosta Wildcats are state champions.
To view the Wildcats’ full story, click here.
Quote: “These players weren’t even born yet when the last championship was won for Valdosta 18 years ago, yet these kids have been compared to those teams since they first started playing at 5 years old,” Alan Rodemaker, head coach, said. “And they had never really measured up; our coaching staff never really measured up. Yet here we are. We did measure up, and I just want to recognize these kids for what they did and how they did it.”
In the Game Sports Network / South Georgia Magazine / Feb – 2017
Alan Rodemaker / Valdosta High School
#2 Top Story of the Year History of Their Own: Valdosta’s Surge Back to the State Title and National Stage
Written by Cole Parker
Summarized by Zack Pine
Photo by Mike Chapman
Published in the February 2017 Edition
