News 25’s 25 Teams in 25 Days: Poplarville Hornets
There’s a standard at stop number four on News 25’s 25 Teams in 25 Days where the Poplarville football program hardly remembers a life before late-season playoff runs and championship games.
Back like they never left, here come the Hornets once again in 2023, starting with their favorite week of the summer. “I think it’s just tradition, and just everybody wants to be on the board. Everybody wants to get Top 10.”
“Coaches will come talk mess with us. You ain’t going to get this, stuff like that, but there’s really big expectations coming into this and we’re really excited.”
Head Coach Jay Beech said, “Culmination of a year’s work, or for some kids, many years of work. Same point system, so you can rank yourself, put yourself up with some of the great Hornet players that have been through here in the past 10 years and you can kind of see where you stack up. If you want to be known as a great player, you need to be on that board.”
For as long as Jay Beech has been the head coach at Poplarville, and even before that, Hornet Ironman Week has been the annual off-season tradition to see who’s been going the extra mile when no one’s watching. “We have that probably two or three kids out of nowhere come up with this really high score that you really weren’t expecting and maybe he breaks his way into maybe the starting lineup with that good score. We realize, okay, this kid is big enough, fast enough, strong enough to play – let’s get him in.”
Players are judged on a 30-point scale across ten different drills for a max score of 300 from bench press to 40-yard dash and everything in between.
Former News 25 Student Athlete of the Week Mark Will almost broke the all-time program record last year, set by Chase Shears in 2019, and they’re still coming for that 244. Defensive end/ outside linebacker Aden Dedeaux said, “We’ve been busting our tail, working out every day, training. I just want to get up there. I want to go one over everybody.”
Running back/ safety Lawrence Jamison said, “I think it’s a great tradition because not all teams really do something like this. We’re really known for our toughness and how physical we are on the field, and I think this really plays a factor into it.”
Tradition meets toughness just about every year at Poplarville, having won 33 out of its last 25 district games, dating back to 2016.
That started a six-year run of making it to 4A South State and four of those years winning South State, but that streak snapped by Stone in 2022 by way of a heartbreaking 32-28 third round defeat. “One negative of being in the South State game seven years in a row is maybe a little complacency. I thought Stone was more excited to be there, hungrier and I thought they played harder.”
“It hurt, and especially the whole thing that happened with Coach Aycock ending up going over there too, so it’s going to be emotions tied into that game for sure.”
Former Poplarville Defensive Coordinator Jacob Aycock, now Stone head coach, and the Hornets get their shot at revenge, as soon as a week two rematch.
One addition to the coaching staff this season is former Pearl River Central Head Coach Jacob Owen, now Poplarville offensive coordinator.
In terms of roster construction, the Hornets bring back 15 seniors and a little less than half their starters from last year’s team that finished 11-2 while giving up the fewest total points in the Coach Beech era. “We’re a very inexperienced group, so I’m just excited to see who steps up and who becomes that guy we can trust.”
“That’s Poplarville football, no matter who’s coaching. I just want to be able to show them that we’re still going to be great on defense.”
Aden Dedeaux and Lawrence Jamison are two veteran seniors returning on defense, with the latter also primed for a running back role in 2023, alongside Nick Miller and JT Robinson in the backfield as well as quarterbacks Sydney Blackmon and Landon Reinike in the ever-dangerous Wing-T offense. “It’s an honor honestly. We’ve had some really great running backs, and it’s really good to be a part of that, and hopefully this year we get some really good plays out of this Wing-T offense.”
Until proven otherwise, pretty safe to say the Hornets are once again a threat to practice past Thanksgiving this year, still chasing the ultimate goal that so many Poplarville teams have come so close to achieving of winning a gold ball. “It would mean the world. It would mean everything. I mean it would be great. We’ve been training all summer to do that.”
“There’s always the group ahead of us, oh, y’all not going to be the ones to do that. I don’t know if y’all are going to be the ones to do it. We could be the ones to do it. You never know, so we’re going to work our tails off, and we’re going to work to get it done.”
“We take pride but those were teams of the past, and those guys that played on those teams can be proud of that, but this year’s team, they’ve got to set their own standards and expectations. They can’t rely on what the guys in the past did, so it’s a brand-new team and we’ve got to go out and prove ourselves every Friday night.”
The Hornets kick off the 2023 campaign with a home game against Jefferson Davis County on August 25th.
