Were you there when Trinity Episcopal and Adams Christian fought down to the wire in a boys’ basketball game at the South State tournament at the AC gym?

When all the madness erupted at the end and the Saints won just before the buzzer, let’s hope the obvious dawned on everyone there (and those who didn’t go but listened to people talk about it in the days that followed).

These two teams need to keep playing each.

And everyone needs a rival.

It’s a brother-against-brother kind of thing. Play someone everyone knows and would love to beat, and all of a sudden you’ve got a big gate, people talking and players giving their biggest effort of the year.

It’s really simple.

That’s why I was glad to see Natchez High picking up on it this fall in football. The Bulldogs will play Jefferson County and Franklin County &045; the first meeting against both schools in quite some time &045; in games that should generate plenty of interest between the two neighboring schools.

The Bulldogs will host Jefferson Sept. 9 and visit Franklin County the following week prior to the start of division play.

Throw that in with the Adams Christian-Trinity game Aug. 26, the Cathedral-St. Aloysius Aug. 25 and the Vidalia-Ferriday game in November, and you’ve got games that will create a storm of interest the entire week, big payouts at the gate and hopefully well-played contests each night out.

This area needs that.

But it’s not just the Miss-Lou. Every school has a per se rival, and every time the two teams meet you’d swear it was so big the pope himself was scheduled to do the coin flip.

This area, for the record, used to have that. Then for whatever reasons, it all faded to black like the end of a bad ’70s movie. The consolidation of Natchez schools ended the North Natchez-South Natchez rivalry, the Adams Christian-Trinity rivalry ended when it got too heated and the Cathedral-Vidalia rivalry now exists only in baseball.

Like brothers straight out of the Baronne family, everyone then did their own thing, picked up their toys and went their separate ways.

Interest, as a result, waned.

Some of it, though, has hung on. You may not get a more packed house at Natchez when it hosts Jefferson County. And thankfully the LHSAA has kept Vidalia and Ferriday in the same district.

Prep football needs local games to create interest, and it’s good to see the local 5A program taking the lead in that.

But in the Bulldogs’ case, it even more paramount as they try to generate interest in a program that’s still trying to get off the mat.

Numbers are up in the program, and let’s hope they stay the course. The program has concrete direction. Folks are buying into it.

That sleeping giant may just awaken. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but soon.

And that will generate interest and turn out gates like no one has seen in years.

Adam Daigle

is sports editor of The Natchez Democrat. Reach him at (601) 445-3632 or at

adam.daigle@natchezdemocrat.com

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