NATCHEZ — Nancy Harveston has grown quite attached to the “Trinity family,” as she calls it.

A second-grade teacher at Trinity Episcopal, Harveston has been teaching young Saints since 2001, and she wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.

“I’ve been teaching for 28 years, and when I got to Trinity, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven,” Harveston said.

“It has a real family atmosphere, and it’s such a good place to work and to be.”

When The Dart landed on Harveston’s house at 113 Brookfield Drive, her love for her school stood out, literally, in the form of wooden football player figures.

Those figures were stationed on the hill leading down to the Trinity football field Friday night in the Saints’ opening game against Prairie View. Each Trinity player had a corresponding figure with his number on it set up on the hill.

“(Head coach) David King’s wife Stephanie told me we should start doing it again,” Harveston said.

“We did it for a few years when my son, Mark, played. When he was a junior, we were playing out of town, and at the opponent’s field, we saw these little men set up that represented all of their players. One of my friends, Connie Freeman, told me we needed to do that.

“We used ours for a couple of years but kind of stopped. Back then they wore their red jerseys, so we painted them red. This year they’re wearing black more, so we’re painting them black.”

For Harveston, making the miniature Saints players is a form of artistic expression.

“I do it as a craft, plus being a teacher at the school gives me an added incentive. We have 34 right now, and when the ninth graders move up, we’ll have more,” she said.

The first time around, Harveston said the school would always take the miniature players out of the ground after each game. This year, she said she hopes they’ll stay put throughout the season.

“I’d like to get metal poles, paint them white, and use them to hold up the men and leave them sticking in the ground. Then we could flag them so people won’t run into them,” she said.

“I hope we leave them up, because it was quite a job putting them in and taking them out of the ground each game.”

It also takes quite a bit of time to construct them, she added.

“This was a really big job. We started out just painting four sheets of plywood, drawing the pattern, cutting them out and sanding it. Then we put the primer on and painted the jerseys and helmets,” Harveston said.

And as for the players, Harveston said she hopes they enjoy seeing their corresponding jersey number on each figure.

“I think they get a kick out of it. I lot of them will touch them when they go down the hill,” she said.