NC prep football team used to wear name of slave owner across its chest. Not anymore.
Daylan Smothers didn’t know who Zebulon B. Vance was until last summer.
Smothers, now a sophomore running back for Vance High School, wore his orange and blue uniform with pride last season. He vividly remembers celebrating the school’s first state football championship in Chapel Hill last December.
For Smothers, and for a lot of Vance players, the school’s logo, that big “V” on their helmets and in the middle of their football field, it meant something.
This was the school where several of Smothers’ relatives attended, including former Cougars’ football star Darien Reynolds, a four-year starter who played in the 2016 Shrine Bowl. But when Smothers learned about Zebulon Vance, during a period of social unrest and awakening in Charlotte last June, he said he was in shock.
Amid nationwide and local protests over the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died on May 25 after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than seven minutes, local school board leaders said they would begin researching and renaming schools named after Confederate figures. Zebulon B. Vance was a Confederate military captain and later senator and governor of North Carolina. He owned slaves and continued to attempt to keep Black citizens from voting after the Civil War.
“I never would’ve thought that,” Smothers said. “It made me do my research. I thought maybe it was good idea to change.”
Earlier this month, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board voted 8-0 to change the school’s name. It is now Julius L. Chambers High School, named for the civil rights icon whose legal work led to the desegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in the 1970s.
Cougars athletic director Carlos Richardson said for the 2020-21 school year, the school will still be called Vance. The official name change starts July 31, 2021.
“Honestly,” Smothers said, “I’m for it. I’m comfortable with it. Having a Black leader, a lawyer actually, who had something to do with civil rights leading my school and playing football for that team with that (name) on the front of my jersey hopefully? That’s cool.”
CMS football finally returns, Vance is ready
After the coronavirus pandemic reached North Carolina in early March, the N.C. High School Athletic Association canceled high school sports. From mid-March until early June, teams were away from campus or ball fields. The NCHSAA allowed football teams to return to summer workouts in June but CMS didn’t allow it until Oct. 12.
The public high school football season won’t begin until February, but Vance second-year coach Glenwood Ferebee thinks his team and others in CMS have some catching up to do.
“A lot of our kids have been lifting,” he said. “You can see in their bodies. So as far as being behind lifting weights and conditioning-wise, I don’t think we’re behind (schools that returned earlier). But scheme-wise, and with the mental part of it, yeah, we are.”
The upcoming high school football season will be a sprint with seven regular-season games and playoffs. For local schools, only two teams per conference are guaranteed playoff spots. Every game will have extra meaning. Vance’s first game as a reigning state champion will be against arch rival and national power Mallard Creek Feb. 26.
“That’s going to be a big game,” Ferebee said. “Neither one of us can have a slip up in that game. One loss can prevent you from going to the playoffs. So that’s a huge game. It’s going to be an exciting game, a packed game. Our kids live for that moment, playing in front of all those people.”
The 2021 Vance team will look a lot different than the one that won a state title last year. The Cougars return seven starters on offense and three on defense. A big blow came when linebacker Power Echols announced he would leave school early and enroll at North Carolina in January.
Echols, last season’s Charlotte Observer defensive player of the year, is a two-time Associated Press N.C. player of the year. He was MVP of the Cougars’ 24-3 title win over Leesville Road High School.
“We have a young group,” Ferebee said. “We graduated an awful lot of seniors, but my 10th grade class came back a lot better, and then I have a great ninth grade class that came in. There’s about seven or eight of those kids that will probably get varsity reps and work this year. It makes you optimistic.”
After the first day of workouts, Ferebee posted a message on Twitter that indicated he wasn’t thinking about winning just one state title at soon-to-be Chambers High.
“Yes, we’re confident in that,” Ferebee said. “Our motto this year is ‘Us versus Us.’ We’re the only one who can stop us from getting (back to the championship round). That’s what we feel. We don’t want to have any hangover from last year. That means working hard, not being complacent, things like that.”
Smothers, for one, doesn’t think that will be a problem.
“People can say what they want and have different opinions,” he said. “Our coaches are here making sure we repeat after what we did last year. Power is gone and he was a big asset to this team, but we’ve got a lot of big-time players who can make big-time plays. I was worried about not having football at all this season. I about cried, but I’m more than happy to be out here now. I’m ready to put in the work. All of us are.”
One final historic season?
Ferebee admits playing as Vance High School this year will be a little strange.
“The kids took a lot of pride in Vance,” he said. “They took a lot of pride in that V that sits in the middle of the field and on the side of our helmet. It’ll be interesting to see how that changes. But also the name change has motivated us. We were the first team in school history to win it and now we have a chance to be the last group to win it in Vance history.”
Richardson, the school’s athletic director, said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will assist in the transition, paying for new uniforms, scoreboards and weight room equipment that use Vance logos. He said the school colors, orange, navy and white, will remain, and that likely, the big “V” logo that represented Vance for so long will be replaced with a big “C” for Chambers High School.
Senior defensive back Nathaniel Spindle said he welcomes the new name, even though he won’t have a chance to wear it.
“I didn’t know who (Vance) was when everything started going on,” he said. “I did my research. I wasn’t proud of it.”
And now with the new name?
“Coming to a school named after an African-American civil rights activist, someone that had such a big impact on the area we stay in -- especially coming from a school like Vance, being as diverse as we are -- and him being one of the first ones to help integrate CMS? It’s an honor for sure.”
Spindle said the first order of business is to set a legacy for the new Chambers High.
He figures a repeat state championship would be a good way to accomplish those goals.
“We feel hungry as a team,” he said. “I feel like we still have something to prove. We had a lot of guys that left and we have a lot of guys stepping up, who want something of their own. We want our own ring. So we’re still hungry. We’re still getting at it. We’re going to be great. We’re dogs.
“We’re pretty talented, and yeah, we should be able to do what we accomplished last year.”
This story was originally published October 24, 2020 at 6:03 AM.
