Stephon Gilmore in Super Bowl gives Rock Hill notoriety of ‘good ol’ football town’
From the beginning, South Pointe has wanted to belong. In this town, that always has meant holding your own on Friday nights.
South Pointe High School opened in 2006, the first high school to open in football-crazy Rock Hill in 30 years. In that time, Rock Hill High School and Northwestern High School had established one of the fiercest high school football rivalries in the country and produced a prodigious amount of NFL players.
“When we opened, people were thinking it was going to water down the talent and everyone was going to suffer,” said Al Leonard, the principal at South Pointe since the school opened in 2006.
Leonard knew that for the community to fully get its arms around this new school, the Stallions would need to prove they could compete with Rock Hill and Northwestern, which is why it was important to him that South Pointe be classified in 4A at the time even if its numbers ended up being only 3A.
“It was important to me to be 4A because we needed to send a message right away that we would be able to compete, and Stephon (Gilmore) helped us prove that,” Leonard said.
Gilmore, who starred at South Pointe and then at South Carolina, will start at cornerback for the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII on Sunday. For the Stallions, it’s just one more sign that they belong. Rock Hill High School (Chris Hope, Pittsburgh Steelers) and Northwestern (Ben Watson, Patriots) already have represented the town’s oldest high schools in the Super Bowl, and Gilmore gives South Pointe its first Super Bowl participant.
He’s used to doing things for the first time in South Pointe history by now. He was a freshman in the school’s first freshman class and scored on a 72-yard quarterback scramble on the first play in Stallions athletics history, in a ninth-grade game against Rock Hill’s ninth-grade team.
“We knew then it was going to be a special crowd,” said Bobby Carroll, Gilmore’s coach throughout his time at South Pointe .
Actually, Carroll knew that the year before. An assistant at Northwestern for 22 years before coming to South Pointe, he first saw Gilmore quarterbacking the Saluda Trail Middle School team in a game on one of Northwestern’s practice fields.
“I said, ‘Where are those kids going to high school?’ ” Carroll said. “They said, ‘They’ll be going to the new high school.’ I said, ‘Well, man, that’s where we need to go.’ ”
Gilmore was a four-star prospect and had scholarship offers from Alabama, Tennessee and others at South Pointe before signing at USC, where he was an All-SEC cornerback in 2010 and led the team in interceptions in back-to-back seasons.
“Stephon was just a phenomenal player, a great leader,” said Carroll, who is now the coach at York High School. “Stephon definitely was a special player.”
Strait Herron was South Pointe’s defensive coordinator at the end of Gilmore’s career there and now is the head coach at the school, which has Gilmore’s Mr. Football trophy sitting in the trophy case at the main entrance. A Rock Hill native and former Northwestern player, Herron says Gilmore’s appearance in the Super Bowl gives him a nostalgic feeling. Herron did an interview with Sports Illustrated this week to talk about Gilmore and Rock Hill football.
“It kind of gives Rock Hill that old feeling of a good ol’ football town,” he said. “The notoriety that it gives to a town like Rock Hill is very important.”
Gilmore was drafted No. 10 overall by the Buffalo Bills in the 2012 NFL draft. This offseason, he signed with the Patriots as a free agent. Carroll expects him to be “laser focused” in his preparation for the biggest sporting event in North America.
“I could text him 100 times, and he won’t text me back until after the game. He prepares mentally as much as he does physically,” the coach said. “I can see him sitting in a film room, laser focused on Philadelphia’s offense and their receivers. He probably won’t interact a whole lot with the media. He probably won’t interact a lot with people like myself. He’ll know this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for a lot of people, and he’ll be focused on the game.”
He was the same way before every high school football game, Carroll said.
“When I think of Stephon, I just think of the type of young man he was. Quiet, unassuming, outstanding athlete, but humble,” said Leonard, a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. “It’s hard for me to pull for the New England Patriots, but I’ve caught myself a few times with Stephon playing.”
He will be cheering for him again Sunday, as will much of Rock Hill and all of South Pointe High School.
“It is a big deal,” Leonard said. “For us to have as much football success as we have had early on means a lot, and Stephon was a big part of that. He set the tone.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2018 at 11:05 AM with the headline "Stephon Gilmore in Super Bowl gives Rock Hill notoriety of ‘good ol’ football town’."