Down a long hallway in Hattiesburg High’s football field house, you will find handmade signs posted on a wall.
One reads ‘Quick-Six’. Another, ‘ATM’. The latest, ‘We Coming’. All three are phrases any Hattiesburg Tiger should be familiar with.
“Our new principal, he met the team in the summer during workouts,” Tiger head coach Tony Vance said. “That’s one of the things that he said. That we’re Tiger Nation and we coming. We kind of took it from there and just ran with it.”
“ATM (Automatic Touchdown Machine), I heard that phrase somewhere at a clinic this offseason,” Vance added. “I really like it. I said, ‘I’m gonna use that’. So we took on ‘ATM’.”
Quick-Six, the brainchild of former Hattiesburg assistant coach Donovan Tate, has probably been around the longest and is exactly what it suggests. A quick scoring, high-flying offense.
“Kids really like that type of stuff,” Vance said. “They buy into it, and we have fun with it as coaches.”
Hard not to have fun when you’re 10-0 and district champions like Hattiesburg is this year. The Tigers followed up the loss of star players like Julian Conner and Jordan Murphy with what’s been a storybook season to this point. So what’s separated these Tigers from talent-rich teams of the past?
“This team is more together. We play together, and it’s not just individual talent,” junior wide receiver Darius Ruffin said. “I mean, we have a lot of talented players, but we’re more of a family. We play together and lean on each other.”
Experience certainly helps, too.
“28 seniors. We’ve got guys that have been in the program and know what the expectations and core beliefs of this program are,” Vance said. They’ve bought into what we’re doing and the way we’re doing it for 3-4 years now. That’s been the biggest difference.”
More and more these days, the U-word comes up with these Tigers. Undefeated. Truth be told, it’s not something they talk about or harp on that much. It’s all about having a week-to-week mentality.
“We don’t talk about how many we’ve won,” Vance said. “Just gotta be 1-0 each and every week, and I think every kid in our locker room will tell you that.”
Ruffin says the team had three major goals heading into this season: Being district, south state and state champions. The first was accomplished last Thursday night with the Tigers’ 49-18 win over Long Beach.
“To be able to accomplish that, going from a team that’s finished fourth a couple of times and finally being district champs, it’s a big deal for us,” Vance said. “But we don’t want that to be the highlight of our season.”
Hattiesburg will close out the regular season this Friday at West Harrison. The next week, they will open the 5A playoffs at home, three wins away from their second goal and four from any team’s ultimate goal.
“We knew we had to put in the work over the summer to be where we’re at right now,” Ruffin concluded. “We’re just having the time of our life, man.”
