After years of shutdowns, Washington County football ready for full season

By Kyle Morton, HighSchoolOT producer

Most high school athletes remember how they felt during the summer and fall of 2020 when uncertainty dominated the NCHSAA landscape.

The uncertainty of not being able to play at all and the relief that came with the hectic and imperfect but still much-better-than-nothing condensed season in spring 2021.

For Washington County's football team, the confusion and frustration that the whole state felt during the early days of the pandemic persisted well after the rest of the state resumed a more normal calendar in the summer of 2021.

"It's tough," head coach Larry Dale said. "These young people just want to play sports. Especially in our community, there's not like a movie theater or bowling alleys and stuff like that, so what do they do? They play sports."

"It was spirit breaking," senior Eaelan Brown-Sanders said. "We were building momentum as a team as a program, but then they came and shut it down."

The county opted out of participating in athletics in the condensed spring 2021 schedule, and no Panther teams participated.

The Panthers watched as their conference rivals got through a season and state champions were crowned, waiting for the opportunity to return to normalcy in 2021 even as that class missed out on its senior season entirely.

Normalcy didn't really fully return for anybody in the fall of 2021, as clusters and quarantines still caused plenty of games to be postponed, moved or canceled, but it especially didn't return for the Panthers.

The team got five games into the season before once again being fully shut down by the county and having their season cut in half.

"Every time we had to tell the guys that we had to go back into quarantine, you could see the pain on their faces," Dale said. "So that was rough."

"40, 50, 60 kids as a team, we worked hard every single day in practice," Brown-Sanders said. "We were getting better, and then it just ends."

"It was kind of heartbreaking because you put in the work," Malkijah Agyapong added.

Doing some basic math, one can quickly intuit that this senior class of Panthers has not even had the opportunity to play a full season since their freshman year.

While almost every student and every athlete has faced challenges relating to development due to the pandemic, the Panthers will be at a significant competitive disadvantage in terms of game experience when they take the field.

To help combat that, Dale has focused on getting the team in the weight room and making sure that smaller portions of the playbook are memorized and mastered before opening things up further.

Dale left his job as the head coach at Granville Central after the 2019 season to move his family closer to the coastal region of the state.

After a year on the staff at First Flight, he landed the head coaching job at Washington County in the summer of 2021 after the position had been essentially vacant since the early portions of 2020.

Now, his job is guiding this year's team through an experience its players have never had before while attempting to set them up for success in a tough conference.

"There's a team about 70 miles from us that wears purple and gold that's pretty darn good every year," Dale said, referring to Tarboro. "I have the utmost respect for them... These guys, they've never gotten to play against them, ever."

While the challenges may be steep, the mere opportunity to go through a full season is one that the program relishes.

"Seeing the joy that we've persevered through it and we've gotten through that, the joy these guys have," Dale said. "They take every moment so seriously... this means everything to them. I believe it's because it was taken away, so now they see how important it was to them."

The joy the kids and community will experience is a victory in itself, but Dale and the players still have their sights set on winning games and finding success.

One reason the program believes that to be possible is a sharp increase in participation from prior years, despite the lack of football the school community has gotten to see and play the last few years.

"We've got 60 kids that want to play football," Keivione Morore said. "Being seniors, we've just got to discipline them and be their role models."

"We want to compete for a conference championship and make a run in the playoffs," Dale said. "Plymouth High School has had tradition throughout the years. These kids want that, and the community wants that back as well, and so do I."