Countdown to kickoff: Spartans core has been together since childhood

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Sports

The official start of high school football season is in 20 days as of July 31, with teams permitted to begin AHSAA competition on Aug. 20.

Mountain Brook will open the season in 21 days, as the Spartans head to Hueytown on Friday, Aug. 21.

As kickoff approaches over the next several weeks, Village Living and Under the Lights will count down the days until the opening kick.

Mountain Brook head coach Chris Yeager said his relationship with this year's senior class didn't start when they arrived on the varsity roster, it started at youth camp, back when most of them were still in kindergarten.

"My history goes even further back than [youth league football]. It goes to kindergarten, because they come to youth camp," Yeager said. "I remember John Colvin at youth camp. I've got a picture of him when we had Wet Ball Wednesday, sitting on the water slide, cradling a football. We do a group picture, and I can go right down the line and point out a lot of these guys."

Yeager said he still has photos from those camps, including one of senior Pearson Trammell receiving a trophy after his team won the youth camp's Super Bowl. He said senior Mason Davis was once the program's ball boy.

"That's what I love about community football," Yeager said.

Yeager said he talks with the youth campers about the vision of one day playing together as one team under the lights on Friday nights, a moment that feels earned once players actually get there.

"Right now you're on separate teams [in youth league]. In seventh grade, you're going to be with your group, and then one day you're going to be with three grades, and it's going to be Friday Night Lights, right under the lights," Yeager said. "And when they get to do that, it's everything they thought it would be."

Yeager said watching that group grow from children into young men, many of them now preparing to leave for college, is what makes the journey special to him.