Unlike what was standard several presidential terms ago, the current Enterprise High School football roster doesn’t feature many players known by their names, instead of numbers, in the House of Adams, where, nonetheless, stories of their games have emerged since they dressed for their first game in seventh grade. An old sports adage is in play, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” Happens to the best among us.
What is known here: All these teenagers represent Enterprise. Today’s words, for current Wildcats and soon-to-be Cats at Dauphin and Coppinville junior high schools, simply had to be written after former EHS center/linebacker Jimmy Carroll, JC to friends, died in a Mobile hospital, June 9, three weeks after coming home, proudly wearing his white Wildcat golf shirt, to celebrate 80th birthdays with his 1962 Enterprise classmates. In Jimmy’s three EHS years playing under Morris Higginbotham, the 1959-61 teams combined for a 2¬¬7-2-1 record and the 1960 Birmingham News State Championship, six years before the Alabama High School Athletic Association began staging playoffs.
Jimmy’s EHS classmate/teammate/friend Lee Warren drove from Montgomery for JC’s funeral June 15; two of his lifelong friends, Charlie Abernathy and your scribe, drove from here. After high school, JC went to the University of Alabama and was on the ’64 and ’65 National Champions and the ’66 undefeated Crimson Tide playing for Coach Paul Bryant. Those teams went 30-2-.