Mobile County’s homecoming season kicked into gear this week as five area schools, Williamson High School, Faith Academy, Saraland High School, Satsuma High School and St. Luke’s Episcopal School, each marked the tradition in their own way, drawing on decades of yearbooks and alumni memories along the way.
Homecoming itself has murky origins nationally, with Baylor, Illinois and Missouri all laying claim to holding the first celebration, but in Mobile County the tradition has taken on distinct local flavor at each campus. This year marks Saraland High School’s sixth year celebrating homecoming as a standalone school, a relatively young tradition compared to some of its neighbors.
St. Luke’s Episcopal School’s homecoming history is similarly recent but well documented. The school began celebrating homecoming in 2010, when it was still growing and fielded homecoming maids but had not yet crowned a queen. That changed the following year, when Monique Hawkins became the school’s first homecoming queen; she has remained part of the court every year since 2009. This year, all 12 of the school’s senior girls will take part in the 2014 homecoming court, and the school plans to bus its lower-school students to the upper-school campus so younger children can take part in the pep rally alongside older students.
Faith Academy’s homecoming roots stretch back further, to 1972, though the school was known as Lott Road Christian School before adopting its current name. A gap in the school’s yearbook records between 1981 and 1988 was significant enough that the school eventually published a compendium in 1988 covering those “lost years” of history.
Satsuma High School’s homecoming milestones include a Silver Homecoming celebration in 1981, when the Gators played B.C. Rain and crowned Jill Wiggins as that year’s queen. The school is now trying to track down yearbooks from the 1970s to fill gaps in its own archive, and has asked anyone with old copies to contact the school directly to arrange a donation.
Williamson High School was also invited to take part in this year’s homecoming retrospective, but organizers were unable to collect photographs from the school in time for this feature.
Together, the five schools’ homecoming histories offer a window into how a single autumn tradition has taken root differently across Mobile County, from century-old rivalries to newer campuses still building their own archives one yearbook at a time. Residents with old homecoming photos or memories from any of the five schools are encouraged to reach out to their school’s alumni association to help fill in the gaps still missing from local yearbook history.