THOMASVILLE, Ala. — The Thomasville Public Library and Museum will host a reception for “Championship Coaches and Teams” on Sept. 29 from 4 to 6 p.m. in downtown Thomasville, in conjunction with the Thomasville Sports Hall of Fame.
The public is invited. The gathering will feature fellowship with former coaches, assistants, players and fans.
A Request for Voices
The library is also asking former members of the 1988 and 2010 Thomasville state championship football teams — along with cheer teams and band members from those seasons — to contribute recorded answers for the current display honoring championship coaches and teams.
Participants should identify themselves and the year they played, then record a statement or an answer to one of the following on a smartphone:
- What do you remember most about practice or the championship game?
- When did you know that your team could go all the way?
- Share a funny story from that championship season.
- What is your favorite quote from your head coach or an assistant from that championship season?
The deadline is Sept. 22. For more information, call the Thomasville Public Library at (334) 636-5343.
Why the Recordings Matter
The request is a small piece of oral history work, and it is the kind of thing that is easy to postpone until it becomes impossible.
The 1988 championship was won by players now in their mid-fifties. Coaches from that staff are older still. The details that make a season vivid — what a coach said at halftime, what practice was like in August, the joke that got a team through a hard week — exist only in the memories of the people who were there. They are not in a box score and they are not in a newspaper archive.
Recording them while the people who hold them are available to record is the entire value of the exercise. Thirty-eight years is long enough that some voices from that season are already gone.
The choice to gather these on smartphones rather than through formal interviews is also sensible. It removes the scheduling obstacle that stops most oral history projects. A former player can answer a question in his kitchen in four minutes and send it in.
Including Cheer and Band
The explicit invitation to cheer teams and band members is worth noting, because those groups are routinely left out of championship retrospectives.
A championship season in a town the size of Thomasville is a community experience rather than a team experience. The band traveled to the same games and practiced through the same August heat. The cheer squad was on the same sidelines. Their memories of that season are as detailed as any player’s, and their perspective on it is different in useful ways.
A display built only from player recollections captures one view of what happened. Adding the band and cheer perspectives captures what the season was like for the school.
Two Championships, Twenty-Two Years Apart
The 1988 and 2010 titles bracket a span in which the town, the school and high school football itself all changed considerably.
A player from 1988 and a player from 2010 experienced different eras of the sport — different offensive systems, different training and conditioning practices, different equipment and safety protocols, different media attention. Placing both in a single display allows visitors to see those changes through the recollections of people who lived them.
For younger residents, the two together establish something else: that this is a program with a history of winning, not a program that won once.
The Library as Local Museum
The Thomasville Public Library and Museum occupies a role common in small Alabama towns, where the library also functions as the community’s repository of local history.
Towns of this size rarely support a standalone historical museum. The library ends up holding the photographs, the yearbooks, the newspaper archives and the artifacts — and, increasingly, the recordings.
That is a genuine public service. Local history that is not deliberately collected is simply lost, because no other institution is collecting it. State archives hold state records. County offices hold legal records. Nobody outside the community is preserving what a 1988 football season felt like in Thomasville.
Event Details
What: “Championship Coaches and Teams” reception
When: Monday, Sept. 29, 4 to 6 p.m.
Where: Thomasville Public Library and Museum, downtown Thomasville
Cost: Free and open to the public
Recording submissions: Deadline Sept. 22. Call (334) 636-5343 for details.
Former players, coaches, assistants, cheerleaders, band members and fans are all encouraged to attend.