Rebels blank Briarwood in jamboree
VESTAVIA HILLS — Buddy Anderson and Fred Yancey shared some laughs and a heartfelt hug after their football teams met on the field named for Anderson at Thompson Reynolds Stadium.
The veteran coaches call themselves “old school” and demonstrated that description by playing one of the very few jamborees on Week Zero of the high school football season.
The final scoreboard declared Vestavia Hills varsity the winner by a 13-0 margin over Briarwood Christian, with the Rebel junior varsity tacking on seven more in the fourth quarter. But neither team would have a victory going into its season-opener and neither would be saddled with a loss.
“We wanted to come out and show that we belong in our region,” Vestavia junior quarterback Eli Sawyer said. “We wanted to come out and show why we’re always Vestavia and we’re always good. We didn’t want to lose. We didn’t want to start the season on a bad foot.”
Don’t tell either coach this was just a practice.
“No, it’s not practice. It’s a game,” said Anderson, the state’s winningest football coach. “Coach Yancey and I are a lot alike. We’re not ready to play a full game at this point in the season. We’re both very old school from the standpoint of the way we bring them along. This is all we need at this point.”
This year’s jamboree wasn’t the viral sensation of the 2017 variety. In that one, Jake Pratt, a Rebels senior with Down Syndrome, got to fulfill a dream as he scored a touchdown as delirious fans chanted his name over and over.
“Jake came by this week and all the kids were just glad to see him,” Anderson said. “That play just turned that boy’s life around.”
This year, the jamboree served its conventional purpose, giving players a taste of competition with no real repercussions. Yancey said his postgame greeting with his rival was lighthearted because it was a jamboree.
“I don’t know what it would be if it was a game,” he said. “Being a jamboree, we come here to get better, we come out here to learn a bunch of lessons and both happened tonight.”
Said Anderson: “We get to see some mistakes and get to correct mistakes. Our opponents will have a game up on us but we’ll learn from what we did tonight. We had great competition. Briarwood is tough and they’re going to have a real good football team.”
The Vestavia coach said his team made mistakes “the normal person’s not going to see … just little things we’ve got to improve on and some big things we’ve got to improve on.”
The home team did all the scoring on this evening. Senior Caleb Huber gave the Rebels the points they would need as he nailed a 38-yard field goal with 6:57 to go in the first quarter and added a 22-yarder with 15 seconds to go in the half.
Sandwiched in between, Evans Crane bolted 20 yards up the middle for a touchdown and Huber added the point after.
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