Dozens of rising seniors from Mobile and Baldwin County high schools have been selected to represent the South squad during the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s All-Star Week, a showcase of the state’s top talent that opens Monday in Montgomery.
Now in its 25th year, the summer gathering brings together standout players and coaches from across Alabama for a week of North-versus-South competition spanning eight sports, along with coaching clinics and conferences held alongside the games.
The week runs from Monday through Friday, with each sport’s stars taking the field on a different day. Every athlete chosen for the rosters is a rising senior who has been recognized as among the best in their sport within their classification.
The rising-senior rule is the distinguishing feature of the event. Because no participant has yet begun his or her final season, All-Star Week functions as a preview of the following school year — the players who will headline Friday nights, region races and state tournament brackets across Alabama’s seven classifications from 7A down to 1A. Selection is by a committee process that draws on coaches’ nominations and statistical submissions from the completed season, and appearing on a South or North roster is among the last formal honors a player can collect before the fall.
The all-star football game, once a marquee event of the week, has since been shifted to a standalone December date; last year’s contest was played at the University of South Alabama’s Hancock Whitney Stadium in Mobile.
That move gave the football showcase its own spotlight and brought it to the Gulf Coast for an edition staged on the South Alabama campus, where the Jaguars play. Hancock Whitney Stadium, opened on the site that evolved from Ladd-Peebles Stadium’s replacement plans, gave Mobile a modern venue for a game that draws college recruiters and recruiting-media attention, and it underscored the coastal region’s standing in Alabama football talent.
The Week’s Schedule
Competition begins Monday with boys and girls golf at Arrowhead Country Club and baseball at Riverwalk Stadium.
Riverwalk Stadium, the home of the Montgomery Biscuits, doubles as the showcase venue for the state’s best rising-senior baseball players, a fitting stage given the ballpark’s role as one of the most familiar settings in Alabama baseball. Arrowhead Country Club, a longtime Montgomery layout, hosts the golfers, whose week includes not only the competitive rounds but time with college coaches and clinic instruction.
Tennis and basketball follow on Tuesday for both boys and girls.
Wednesday’s slate includes softball, along with boys and girls cross country and boys and girls soccer.
The week wraps up Thursday with the volleyball all-star match.
Spreading eight sports across four days lets each event have the stage and keeps Montgomery busy with a rotating cast — by midweek the city holds baseball players, golfers, tennis players and basketball players at once, along with the coaches attending the clinics and rules conferences that run in parallel. The coaching conferences are a significant draw on their own: high school coaches from every classification gather for clinics led by college and professional staffs, and the week doubles as continuing education and networking for the coaches who will run the fall programs.
The North-versus-South format divides the state roughly along a line through central Alabama, with rosters assembled to balance classifications and regions. For the athletes, the week is a first taste of playing alongside rivals from Friday nights past — and, for many, a last summer stop before their senior seasons begin with practices in late July.
The Coastal Region’s Selections
The South rosters are stacked with players from schools throughout the Mobile and Baldwin County area, a reflection of the region’s deep bench of high school talent heading into the fall season.
In girls tennis, the South roster includes Anna Marie Bentley of St. Luke’s, Danielle Day and Anna Louch of Saraland, and Libbie Hamilton, Mary Michael Key and Margaret Sullivan of St. Paul’s.
The boys tennis squad features Nick Short of McGill-Toolen, Gabriel Perkins of Satsuma and Calvin Hughes of Fairhope.
On the golf course, the girls team includes Laura Burch and Jordyn Martin of McGill-Toolen and Ella Kate Hewes of Daphne, coached by UMS-Wright’s Jay Koziol. The boys golf squad also carries area standouts onto the South team.
Each of the coastal selections carries a senior-season story that will resume in August, when practices open and classification races begin again. Until then, Montgomery offers the stage.
The selections trace the geography of coastal Alabama athletics. Mobile’s private school powers — McGill-Toolen, St. Paul’s, UMS-Wright and St. Luke’s — have long dominated individual sports in the region, with tennis and golf programs that win state titles regularly and feed players to college rosters. Saraland’s rise over the past two decades has added a public-school contender in the northern part of Mobile County, while Baldwin County schools such as Fairhope and Daphne draw from some of the largest student populations on the coast.
St. Paul’s Episcopal School, in particular, has built one of the most decorated multi-sport programs in the state, with state championships across tennis, cross country and track. McGill-Toolen, the Catholic school on Government Street, has long been a pipeline in tennis and golf, and its girls programs have won titles across multiple sports. UMS-Wright, in Midtown Mobile, carries a similar multi-sport pedigree, and its coaches — like Koziol, who leads the South golf staff — are frequently selected to direct all-star squads, a recognition that follows from program success.
Baldwin County’s presence on the rosters reflects the county’s growth. Fairhope and Daphne, sitting on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, have become two of the fastest-growing cities in Alabama, and their high schools compete in the state’s largest classifications with enrollment that keeps climbing. Gulf Shores, Spanish Fort, Foley and Robertsdale round out a Baldwin contingent that travels across the Bay for region competition and, in July, to Montgomery for the state’s showcase.
For the Mobile area, the week’s outcome matters less than the exposure. College coaches from across the Southeast attend the events, and a strong showing in Montgomery can turn a solid rising senior into a recruited one before his or her final season begins.
The South teams will practice in the days before the games open, with rosters assembled from dozens of schools across the southern half of the state, and the week’s results will go into the AHSAA’s record as the 25th edition of an event that has become a fixture of Alabama’s summer sports calendar.
The AHSAA, headquartered in Montgomery, has run the all-star week since the late 1990s, growing it from a football-centric showcase into the eight-sport gathering that now anchors the association’s summer. The event sits alongside the AHSAA’s championship calendar — the state tournaments and title games that run through the school year — as one of the few times athletes from every classification appear in the same city in the same week. Mobile-area players who dominate coastal competition spend the season facing a narrow band of opponents; All-Star Week is where they measure themselves against the best from Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa and the Tennessee Valley.
The South coaching staffs for each sport are drawn from the state’s high school ranks, selected for their program’s success and their standing among peers, and the assignments rotate through the state’s regions. Directing an all-star squad is considered an honor within the coaching profession — a recognition that follows state titles, deep playoff runs and long service — and South Alabama-area coaches have appeared on the staffs repeatedly over the event’s history.
For the players, the format compresses a season’s worth of variables into a day or two. Tennis players arrive having played team matches all spring; golfers come off the high school season’s medalist races; basketball players report having just finished the summer league circuit with their schools. The all-star setting asks them to blend with strangers in a matter of one or two practices and to perform in front of crowds that include college coaches evaluating them for scholarships.
The week also carries meaning for the schools whose players are chosen. Roster selections circulate in local media and in school announcements, and multiple selections from a single program — as with the St. Paul’s and McGill-Toolen girls tennis groups on this year’s South roster — signal program depth rather than individual luck. Athletic departments publicize the selections as a recruiting asset of their own, evidence to younger players and their families that the program develops college-level talent.
By the time the volleyball match closes out Thursday, the week will have put roughly 200 of the state’s best rising seniors on the field, course, court and track in Montgomery, with the Mobile and Baldwin County delegation among the largest regional contingents on the South rosters.