When UMS-Wright and St. Paul’s Episcopal School meet this fall for their Battle of Old Shell Road rivalry game, the matchup will carry more weight than usual. Both programs have spent this July grieving young men connected to their football families, and coaches and players say the losses have reshaped how they are approaching the season.
Former St. Paul’s player Walter Hensley, 19, and former UMS-Wright player Mark “McNeil” Mostellar, 21, died in a hunting camp fire in Evergreen on July 1. Both were students at the University of Alabama.
Evergreen, the small Conecuh County seat on the road between Mobile and Montgomery, is the kind of place hunting camps gather families and old friends for weekends, and the July 1 fire turned one of those gatherings fatal. The two young men had been on opposite sides of the Old Shell Road rivalry — Hensley a St. Paul’s graduate, Mostellar a UMS-Wright one — and had gone on to Tuscaloosa together, the pattern of Mobile private school football players continuing at the state’s flagship university.
Later in the month, two separate boating accidents claimed the lives of former UMS student James “J-Roe” Hand and UMS alumna and Board of Trustee member Kristen Delaney. Hand had played for coach Sam Williams’ first UMS football team the previous season.
The July toll thus reached four young lives connected to the two schools, in two separate accidents, within a month. For programs the size of UMS-Wright and St. Paul’s — private schools whose teams are close-knit by design, where seniors are leaders and alumni return to the sidelines — the losses were felt not as news from elsewhere but as absences in familiar places: locker rooms, pews, and the bleachers at games.
The tragedies were the focus of conversation at Mobile County Media Days on Monday, where players and coaches from both private schools reflected on how the deaths have affected their teams.
“I feel like it has not only woken me up in my faith and in my walk, but it has woken the whole community up,” St. Paul’s linebacker Will Abrams said. “Everyone is realizing that anything can happen at any moment, and you should live every moment to the best of your ability. What really truly matters is your relationship with God and your relationship with people.”
Williams reflected on Hand’s death and what it has meant for his program. “I am really careful about saying tragedy brings people together, though it does,” he said. “More than anything, I think it points you back to your purpose and your passion. We lost a young man who was a dear teammate, friend, son, brother. I can tell you that kid lived life to the fullest.”
Williams’s hesitation in that quote — being “really careful” about the cliché — carries the thought. Sports rhetoric runs to the line about teams growing closer through loss, and a coach who refuses the easy version is saying something more precise: that grief does not automatically bind anyone, but it does strip away the distractions that keep a program from knowing what it is for.
‘Walter was very special to me’
St. Paul’s coach Ham Barnett offered a similar tribute to Hensley. “Walter was very special to me,” Barnett said. “He was one of those guys I just had a special relationship with and his family as well. I coached all three brothers. We wanted to honor Walter in some way. There was some talk about maybe retiring his number, but Walter would laugh at that.”
Instead of retiring the jersey, St. Paul’s decided to pass down the No. 12 Hensley wore as a senior to the player who best embodies his character, with the team voting each year. This season, strong safety Bo Ladner will wear the number.
The mechanism matters as much as the gesture. Retiring a number removes it from use and fixes a memory in place; passing it down makes the memory active, requiring the team to look at itself each year and ask which current player carries the standard. The annual vote converts one player’s legacy into a running standard of conduct — energy, joy, the kind of teammate people remember — and gives the program a way to talk about character without ever calling it a lesson.
“I’m really excited for it,” Ladner said. “I thought I was going to be 0, and coach Ham brought up the voting for No. 12. I thought Hayden Fincher would have been great to have it, but I’m excited to have it and excited to play this year.”
Ladner’s surprise at the vote — he had expected a different number entirely — underlines how the choice worked: the team decided on its own who best fit the description of the player they had lost.
Abrams, who played alongside Hensley, called Ladner a fitting choice. “He was always a very infectious guy, always high energy. I never saw him have a bad day,” Abrams said. “You wouldn’t find anybody on this earth who would ever say anything bad about Walter Hensley. That is why we have chosen to honor him in this way.”
Williams said the losses have left his team with a deeper appreciation for time spent together. “Hug your brother every day,” he said. “Don’t take these days for granted. I told our guys it was 249 days since we last played a game. How many of those days did we take for granted? I do think we have a little greater appreciation of the limited time we have together.”
The coach’s arithmetic — 249 days counted out loud to a room of teenagers — is the kind of specific number that makes an abstraction land. Two hundred forty-nine days between games is two-thirds of a year in which the last season’s team, including Hand, had assembled and dispersed, and the count asks each player to account for how much of it he treated as replaceable.
A rivalry with new stakes
The rivalry game will also look different this year for a reason unrelated to the tragedies. With the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s separation of public and private schools, the UMS-Wright versus St. Paul’s matchup is now a region game in Double-A, adding stakes to the Oct. 16 contest at St. Paul’s.
The reclassification changed the meaning of a game that had always mattered. For decades the Battle of Old Shell Road — the two schools sit a few blocks apart on the same Mobile corridor — was the emotional high point of both schedules but a non-region exhibition, with no championship consequences. Under the AHSAA’s split of public and private competition into separate classifications, the two schools landed in the same Double-A region, and the rivalry became a contest that counts toward the playoffs.
Both coaches said they intend to honor the players and alumni lost this summer when that night arrives.
The Oct. 16 date now carries two layers at once: the first region meeting of a reclassified rivalry, and the first time both programs will stand together in a stadium since the summer took four young men from their extended families. Whatever ceremony the schools stage — and both staffs said remembrance would be part of the night — will take place under the lights of a game that now has playoff implications, a combination neither anticipated when the season was scheduled.
For Barnett, July has prompted personal reflection as well. “Maybe I got too comfortable in my walk, and it takes something like this to reset everything,” he said. “I just know the most important thing is a relationship with Jesus and a relationship with people. I feel like I’m awakened. It’s a newness, and I want our kids to experience it.”
Barnett’s candor — a coach admitting comfort had crept into his own life — set the tone his program took into the fall. The confession is of a piece with the practices both schools adopted: the passed-down number at St. Paul’s, the counted days at UMS-Wright, the coaches’ refusal to let the summer be processed as an event that happened elsewhere.
Mobile County Media Days continued Tuesday, with coaches and players from other area high schools previewing the upcoming season. The event is sponsored by Greer’s Markets, the Mobile Sports Authority and iHeartRadio.
Media Days itself is the Gulf Coast’s annual opening act for football season, gathering coaches and players from schools across the county in front of local media before two-a-days begin. Its sponsors reflect the event’s civic footing — a hometown grocer, the authority created to develop sports tourism in Mobile, and the market’s radio operator — and its two-day format gave the private schools’ story a public airing that a press conference alone would not have.
What the two programs carry into the season, then, is a set of concrete practices built out of grief. St. Paul’s will put No. 12 on a strong safety the team voted for, and will keep the vote alive every year. UMS-Wright’s coach has told his players to count the days and hug their brothers, and made the counting a habit. And when the Old Shell Road rivals meet at St. Paul’s on Oct. 16, in a game that now counts in the standings, the summer’s four losses will be part of the night — remembered not by the schools’ administration but by the teenagers on the field, several of whom grew up beside the young men the season now honors.
That is the difference between a tragedy mentioned in a season preview and one woven into a program. UMS-Wright and St. Paul’s have chosen the latter, and both coaches say the choice has already changed how their teams practice, pray and look at one another — which is, in the end, what both Williams and Barnett said the summer asked of them.