‘I think this football team has helped heal’

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Nearly a year after a deadly tornado ravaged Mayfield, Ky., its high school football team is on the verge of a state championship.

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The football players milled about on the gym floor Thursday afternoon, some in sport coats, some in sweatpants, as band members fiddled with instruments and cheerleaders riled up the student body: “Beat Tigers,” “Beat Tigers.” It was another pep rally at Mayfield High, this one the formal send-off for a dynamo team that had been through seemingly everything and emerged on the other side with one final challenge: Friday’s Kentucky state championship game.

Mayfield is a town of about 10,000 in Western Kentucky, closer to Nashville or St. Louis than Louisville or Lexington. It was also ground zero for a deadly tornado that blasted through the region last Dec. 10, decimating homes and businesses, tearing at the fabric that held together a tightknit community.

A year later, the town is still reeling but recovering. While some landmarks, such as Carr’s Barn Bar-B-Q, have rebuilt and reopened, others, such as the popular Wilma’s Kountry Kitchen on 12th Street, remain shuttered. Even before the tornado tossed the town into upheaval, though, Morris knew he was approaching a professional crossroads. He retired from teaching last December and wasn’t sure whether he would continue as the school’s coach and athletic director. After the dust settled and the holidays passed, he took a couple of weeks and realized he didn’t have much of a choice. The team needed him. The town needed the team.

The town tried to focus on what they had, not what they had lost. They talked about upcoming games against small-school rivals such as Paducah Tilghman and crosstown foe Graves County and compared Morris’s latest group with some of his past champions. He didn’t need to mention the details. How two of his players lost their homes. How many spent days living in hotel rooms. How some had to temporarily relocate to other towns, rooming with distant family members. Others left town for good.

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