By Bob Sutton
Special to The Alamance News
Graham won’t field a varsity football team this year, citing a shortage of players amid concerns about safety for players on a roster that would be mostly sophomores and freshmen.
Third-year coach Mykel Searcy said there have been slightly more than 20 players attending most practices. Getting to 30 players would be ideal.
“We’re in that mode that we’re trying to build a team,” Searcy said. “We’re trying to grow the numbers.”
The only senior signing up to play is Kamri Moore, a reserve running back and linebacker last season.
“We need 15 more of them,” Searcy said in regard to Moore.
Searcy said there were several departures from the team in recent months, with players moving out of Alamance County in some cases.
“It happened all at once,” he said.
The past two years, Graham’s roster numbers wavered between 26 and 36 players, Searcy said.
The Red Devils had a 0-10 record last year. Their combined record the past three seasons is 2-28. Their last winning season came with an 8-5 record in 2004.
Graham won a state championship in 2000 in the second of its back-to-back seasons of advancing to a state title game.
High school football openers are scheduled for August 21.
Meanwhile, Graham will aim to field a team for junior varsity games.
“If approved for JV football, that will be beneficial for Graham High School,” Searcy said before the formal decision. “It will allow us to focus on those fundamentals. It will provide those needed reps they need in a game and give them a chance to get experience under their belt.”
Schedule implications
Graham will attempt to put together a junior varsity schedule. That might be tricky because the Red Devils weren’t expected to compete on the JV level.
Some schools in the Mid-Carolina Conference likely already set up JV games against other schools for the week of the scheduled varsity matchup vs. Graham.
The other six football-playing schools in Alamance County, plus Mid-Carolina Conference member Roxboro Person and Graham’s three slated non-league opponents (Chatham Central, Cedar Ridge, East Chapel Hill), will have to scramble to fill their schedule vacancies if they desire to keep a full schedule. Williams already was slated for only nine games this year because during the winter Orange revealed it was nixing a non-league meeting with the Bulldogs.
The lack of a full schedule is bound to irritate some officials with Alamance County’s larger schools, who expressed concerns in the conference realignment process prior to the 2024-25 school year about Graham and fellow Class 4-A school Cum-mings and their abilities to field teams in some sports. Those schools didn’t play baseball during the past season.
Officials from Graham and Cummings, with the support of the Alamance-Burlington School System, made pitches to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association to be included in the same conference with the other schools from the county.
That request was granted after earlier conference drafts had those schools targeted for another league.
Chatham Central, Wes-tern Alamance, Roxboro Person, Southeast Ala-mance, and Cummings were supposed to play home football games vs. the Red Devils this year.
Other schools in the state have had roster shortages as well.
High Point Central announced in January that it wouldn’t play varsity football in 2026. Last month, West Caldwell decided to nix its varsity season this year.
Last week, Southern Guilford notified its opponents that it wouldn’t compete at the junior varsity level but would keep its varsity slate intact. Southern Guilford is a Class 5-A school.
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