Cedar Hollow High's football team is 6-0 for the first time in living memory, the latest chapter in a turnaround that has taken the program from a 1-9 record three years ago to one of the metro area's most talked-about teams.
The Cedar Hollow Cougars finished 1-9 three seasons ago, the year before coach Reggie Thornton took over a program he said had lost nearly all of its youth-league feeder relationships to more competitive programs elsewhere in the metro area. The team improved to 4-6 in Thornton’s first season, then 8-3 last year with a run to the quarterfinals. This season, at 6-0 through six games, Cedar Hollow has already matched its longest winning streak in school history, with three games remaining before the playoffs.
“People ask me what changed, like there’s one answer,” Thornton said. “The honest answer is boring. We just kept the same coaching staff and the same core of kids together for four years instead of the program falling apart every time we had a bad season, which is what used to happen here.”
Rebuilding the youth pipeline first
Thornton said his first year on the job was spent less on varsity strategy than on rebuilding relationships with the neighborhood’s youth football leagues, which he said had increasingly steered talented players toward transferring to schools outside Cedar Hollow by the time they reached high school. “We were losing our best athletes before they ever put on a Cedar Hollow jersey,” Thornton said. “I spent that first spring at every youth league game I could find, just showing up and being present, because the previous coaching staff hadn’t been doing that and families noticed the absence.”
Senior quarterback DeShawn Miller, who has started for Cedar Hollow since his sophomore year, said he considered transferring to a stronger program after the 1-9 season but ultimately decided to stay because of Thornton’s approach. “Coach told me straight up that year that the program wasn’t where it needed to be yet, but that he wasn’t going anywhere and neither should I,” Miller said. “A lot of guys on this team had that same conversation with him. That’s basically the whole turnaround right there — guys who could have left and didn’t.”
This team means more in this neighborhood than a scoreboard. On a Friday night, our stands are full of people who don’t always have a lot of good news to celebrate together, and for two hours, this is theirs.
Reggie Thornton, Head Coach, Cedar Hollow High
A booster club with new momentum
Booster club president Carol Bianchi said fundraising has more than doubled over the past two years as the team’s success has drawn renewed interest from alumni and neighborhood businesses that had stopped donating during the program’s leanest years. “We used to send out fundraising letters and hear nothing back,” Bianchi said. “Now local businesses along the neighborhood’s main commercial strip are calling us asking how they can sponsor a game.” She said the additional funds have gone toward new practice equipment and a stipend increase for assistant coaches, several of whom had been volunteering unpaid during the program’s losing years.
City Council Member Gary Petrowski, who represents Cedar Hollow and has pushed for addiction-treatment funding in the district, said the team’s success has become a rare unifying topic in a neighborhood that has weathered years of difficult news. “I get calls from constituents about opioid treatment funding, about factory jobs that aren’t coming back. Those are hard conversations,” Petrowski said. “Then I go to a Cedar Hollow game on a Friday night and it’s the one place in this district where everybody just seems happy to be there together. I don’t want to overstate what a high school football team can fix, but I also don’t want to understate what it means to people right now.”
Staying grounded with three games left
Thornton said he has tried to keep the team focused on its remaining regular-season games rather than the unbeaten streak or preseason talk of the program as a contender in this year’s metro-area football preview. “I don’t let them read what’s written about us,” he said. “We were 1-9 not that long ago, and I remind them of that every single week, because forgetting how that felt is exactly how a program like ours slides back to where it was.” Miller said the team’s remaining schedule includes a rematch against Bellwater Central High, one of the metro area’s other contenders, that he expects will determine playoff seeding. “That’s the game everybody in this building has circled,” he said. “Everything else has been us proving we belong in that conversation. That game is where we find out if we actually do.”
Thornton said the program’s turnaround has also changed how he recruits assistant coaches, several of whom he said now approach him about joining the staff rather than the other way around, a reversal from his first year when he struggled to fill out a full coaching roster. “I couldn’t get anybody to return my calls my first spring here,” he said. “Now I’ve got former college players calling me asking if there’s a spot on staff. That tells you something changed beyond just the win total.” He added that he has resisted expanding the coaching staff too quickly, wanting to preserve the close relationships between players and the assistants who stuck with the program through its leanest years.
Bianchi said the booster club is now discussing, for the first time, whether the program has outgrown its current practice facilities, a conversation she said would have seemed absurd during the 1-9 season. “Three years ago we were just trying to keep the lights on for practice,” she said. “Now we’re having a real conversation about whether we need a second practice field because participation numbers are up at the youth level too, since kids want to be part of what this program has become.” She said the club plans to raise the idea formally with the school district’s athletics office once the season concludes.