Robertsdale head coach Justin Jones is entering his second season with the Bears, but in many ways he’s treating the 2026 campaign as a fresh start, given how late he arrived on the job before last season.
Jones took over a program that had gone just 2-24 over its previous 26 games before he was hired late last summer. Despite the compressed timeline to install his system, Robertsdale doubled its win total from the previous 26 games combined, finishing 4-6 in Jones’ first season.
“To me, this is kind of year one because we got there so late last year,” Jones said. “It was more like year zero.”
The arithmetic of his arrival explains the framing. A coach hired in the final weeks before a season inherits a roster that spent the summer installing someone else’s terminology, strength program and scheme. Players learned the offense in August instead of June, and the varsity went into Friday nights running a system weeks younger than their opponents’. The four wins, modest on a scoreboard, represented a doubling of what the program had managed in the two-plus seasons before.
Jones, who has 13 years of head coaching experience in Alabama and has guided teams to the playoffs in nine of those seasons, said he’s optimistic about where the program stands heading into his first full offseason at the helm.
“We’re just excited about where we are,” Jones said. “This being year one, we’re excited about where we’re at, the possibilities in front of us now. You got to go make the most of those opportunities and then kind of see where things lay out. After about eight or nine weeks in the season, hopefully we’re fighting for a chance to do something and make a playoff game in Robertsdale.”
A playoff appearance would be Robertsdale’s first since 2004. The drought, now more than two decades long, stretches across four coaching tenures and three realignments, and it has become the measuring stick by which every Robertsdale season is judged. Programs in that position typically measure progress in inches: competitive halves becoming competitive games, competitive games becoming wins, wins becoming a November date.
A harder hill to climb
The Bears’ path won’t be easy: enrollment figures placed Robertsdale in Class 6A, a classification the Alabama High School Athletic Association restructured this cycle to include the state’s 32 largest schools, among them programs that competed in the old Class 7A under the previous alignment.
For the next two AHSAA classification cycles, public and private schools will compete in separate playoff brackets. The split is one of the most consequential rule changes in recent Alabama high school football history, reshuffling regions and championship paths across the state, and it arrived just as Robertsdale found itself absorbed into the largest classification the AHSAA has fielded.
Robertsdale’s Region 1 slate includes several other schools near the bottom of that 32-team enrollment pool, with Fairhope ranked 28th, Foley 29th, Davidson 30th and Robertsdale 31st. Only Madison County’s Buckhorn is smaller among Class 6A programs.
The region also includes larger enrollment schools such as Baker (8th), Mary Montgomery (14th), Alma Bryant (17th) and Daphne (20th), giving Robertsdale one of the toughest size disadvantages in its own region.
The gap matters because enrollment drives depth. A school with nearly twice Robertsdale’s student body fields two platoons of linemen who rest on the sideline; the Bears will ask their best players to log heavy minutes both ways in October heat. Coaches at the bottom of a classification’s enrollment pool manage that disparity through scheme and conditioning, and by keeping young players in the program long enough to develop them — a strategy that requires the continuity Jones is trying to establish after years of turnover.
Regional geography adds travel demands unique to south Alabama. Region 1 stretches across Mobile and Baldwin counties and beyond, meaning long bus rides for road games in Daphne, Fairhope and Foley, in a state where some regions fit inside a single metro area. The wear of that travel is a season-long tax no enrollment figure captures.
Building through consistency
Jones said breaking the program’s long playoff drought will come down to fundamentals rather than any single scheme or strategy.
“It’s consistency,” Jones said. “Just figuring out the things you do on a daily basis is what in turn becomes what Friday nights become. Once that initial shock or that first series or that first whatever, it’s just being really consistent in who we are. I think usually teams that are really consistent are teams that find ways to win ball games.”
The emphasis on daily habits is the standard doctrine of program rebuilds, but it carries particular weight at a school coming off 2-24. Losing rosters often re-learn the same lesson each season because the players turn over faster than the culture does. Jones’s first full cycle — a winter in the weight room, a summer of 7-on-7 and camp, a preseason of repetition — is the first sustained block of that work the program has had since his arrival.
Robertsdale returns four starters on both sides of the ball heading into the season. On offense, senior quarterback Cub Jones leads a group that includes senior wide receiver Colton Boudreaux, senior offensive lineman Eli Rodgers and sophomore offensive lineman Jonathan Barragan.
“Offensively, of course, naturally by the position your quarterback has to kind of be that guy,” Jones said. “And then Eli Rodgers does a really good job, and he kind of sets the tone for that group.”
A second-year starter at quarterback in the same system is the single biggest variable in the Bears’ favor. Cub Jones spent last season learning the offense alongside his teammates; in 2026 he will run it from memory, calling protections and checking plays at the line the way a veteran is supposed to. Barragan’s presence matters beyond his years — an underclassman lineman developing behind experienced seniors is how a program builds the depth it currently lacks.
On defense, Jones expects senior linebacker Hunter Williams to anchor the unit, alongside returning starters Jahiem Howard on the defensive line and Kyron Williams and Brandon Clayton in the secondary. All four are seniors, giving Robertsdale a veteran presence on that side of the ball entering the year.
The senior-heavy defense is both asset and deadline. Veterans who have absorbed a year of the system can line up faster and adjust on the field, which is worth several points a game against the region’s bigger offenses. But the same group graduates next spring, which means the 2026 season is the window — the roster’s experience will never be higher under this staff than it is now.
Jones arrives at Robertsdale after previous head coaching stops at Beauregard, where his teams made the playoffs in each of his final three seasons, along with head coaching roles at Florala, New Brockton and Cordova. He has also served as an assistant coach at Enterprise and as defensive coordinator at Prattville.
The resume spans most of Alabama’s football geography: small-town programs at Florala and New Brockton where rosters are thin by necessity, a Cordova program rebuilding, the Beauregard run that proved he could sustain winning, and assistant stints at Enterprise and Prattville — the latter among the state’s perennial powers — that shaped the systems he now installs. Nine playoff appearances in 13 seasons is the credential the Bears hired, and the reason optimism in the program is not merely seasonal.
Robertsdale’s push for its first playoff berth in more than two decades will unfold against the backdrop of a newly aligned Class 6A, where enrollment gaps between the region’s largest and smallest programs remain significant. How the Bears fare against that disparity in size will be one of the storylines to watch as the season approaches.
The schedule will offer early readings. Region games decide postseason qualification in the AHSAA format, so the Bears’ September results carry double weight — each one is simultaneously a step in the rebuild and a line in the standings that determines whether November football returns to Robertsdale for the first time since 2004.
The community around the program has grown up alongside the drought. Robertsdale sits in the middle of Baldwin County’s rapid growth, which has swelled school enrollments across the region and made every classification cycle a reshuffling of old rivalries. A winning season in a town that has waited this long would register well beyond the bleachers, and Jones’s staff has framed the year to players in exactly those terms.
Jones’s own calendar gave him the thing his first year could not: time. With a full offseason, a returning quarterback, four senior starters on each side of the ball and a system installed from spring drills forward, the 2026 Bears will be, for the first time in his tenure, exactly the team he prepared them to be.