The best small-town football in NC comes from a place where dinner builds championships
In a town of 20,000 people, in a place where Friday nights have been reserved for high school football for decades, in a stadium where golden lions rule, the Shelby High football team reigns as local royalty.
Their perch at the top of the local sports food chain, however, comes at a price, and that price is pressure to win. All the time. Every game.
“If we don’t win the state championship around here, it feels like there was no reason for the season,” Shelby linebacker Malaki Hamrick said.
Hamrick stars for the latest version of the Shelby Golden Lions, who have won six state titles in the past eight years and will try to grab another at 3 p.m. Saturday in Raleigh against Wallace-Rose Hill in the NCHSAA 2A state championship at Carter-Finley Stadium.
Hamrick’s statement might sound extreme, but the UNC recruit has played on teams that won state titles as both a freshman and a sophomore before losing in the second round of the state playoffs as a junior.
That’s about par for the course in Shelby, 45 minutes west of Charlotte in Cleveland County. They don’t win states every time, but they’re in contention all the time. And if they win Saturday, that will be seven state championships in the past nine years and 12 NCHSAA state titles for Shelby overall.
Within a few miles of Gardner-Webb University, Shelby is also known for its top-notch barbecue and its yearly role as host of the American Legion World Series.
The late banjo-picking pioneer Earl Scruggs may be Shelby’s most famous export now that all the big textile mills have shut down, since Scruggs invented a type of three-fingered bluegrass banjo picking used all over the world today. But Shelby’s football team has been traveling places for years, too, and coming back with big trophies.
Daylin Lee used to go to Shelby games as a kid, watching his brother Darquez quarterback the 2015 state championship team and wondering when he would get a chance to put on a gold helmet himself. Now he’s the Shelby quarterback, a junior who has fired 45 touchdown passes and only five interceptions during a 14-1 season.
“The community is strong for us,” Lee said. “They pour love into this program.”
And that’s true. Each Thursday night during the season is “Supper Club,” a tradition for the past 30 years in Shelby in which adults in the community take 4-5 football players out to eat. The idea is not only to talk football but for the players to get to know some business people in Shelby so that, after their playing careers are over, they have contacts who can help them get jobs in the area or get into college.
What happens in ‘The Pile’ stays in ‘The Pile’
Many of those players end up living in Shelby and fathering their own sons, and those sons play football for Shelby, and the cycle repeats. Said Patrick McMurry, an architect in Shelby who now dabbles as the team’s unofficial historian: “I’m a fourth-generation Shelby football player.”
That’s not unusual. If you throw a rock in Shelby, it will hit at least one person who has either played for the Golden Lions or has a relative who did. After you apologize for throwing that rock, you can ask them to tell you about “The Pile” — a pre-game tradition that dates back to the 1960s.
“The Pile” is an intricate and dangerous-looking pre-game pileup, something that Shelby actually practices every now and then to try to ensure that no one gets hurt. The big linemen begin “The Pile” by getting into the middle and bending down low. Then come the medium-sized guys, constructing the middle floors.
Then come the smaller guys, jumping and cartwheeling and leaping onto their teammates’ backs, until there is a swarm of black-and-gold humanity at midfield and a lot of parents wondering: “Wait, is my kid OK in there?”
Invariably, he is. No one gets hurt in “The Pile,” or at least no one tells anybody if they do. And “The Pile” — they prefer you don’t call it a dogpile, as they are Golden Lions, not dogs — is the way they psych themselves up.
“The Pile is like winning the World Series every Friday night,” said Lance Ware, who was Shelby’s head coach from 2011-18 before he took a coaching job at Appalachian State. “We did it when I played there, too, and I graduated in 1992. You’d do The Pile, and then you’d go win a game.”
And man, has Shelby ever won. The Golden Lions have captured at least one state championship in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s and ‘10s. A win Saturday night against Wallace Rose-Hill would mean that Shelby has won a state title in each of the past six decades.
I visited Shelby this week and spoke to a number of people in the community — players, coaches, fans and parents. Quickly, I realized that the traditions that encircle Shelby football have been in place so long that, as offensive-line-coach-turned-radio-analyst Jeff Jones said: “One thing you’ll find out about Shelby is that around here, 30 years really isn’t that long.”
The ‘monster’ in Shelby
There are small-town football hotbeds like Shelby dotting the map of North Carolina — in Kannapolis, Reidsville, Murphy, Tarboro, Greenville and Pilot Mountain, to name a few. There’s also Crest, a slightly bigger school that shares Cleveland County with Shelby, is located just six miles down the road and boasts its own spectacular football tradition. But you could make a strong argument that Shelby plays the best small-town football on average in North Carolina, year after year, decade after decade.
It’s always state championship or bust in Shelby, as current head coach Mike Wilbanks well knows.
“That’s kind of the monster that’s been created,” Wilbanks said. “But we don’t shy away from it. We always talk about winning a state championship. Every year, we embrace that expectation.”
Wilbanks also serves as the athletic director for Shelby and is proud that the school isn’t a one-trick pony. The Shelby men’s soccer team, for instance, just won its third state championship last month. But football rules, drawing a few thousand for most home games and up to 7,000 for a rivalry like Shelby-Crest and big playoff games.
For the playoffs, once the grass on the field has gone dormant in November, they paint the lines and numbers black at Shelby. It’s another tradition, one stemming from a time in 1989 when the groundskeepers (OK, they didn’t have groundskeepers, it was just the assistant coaches) ran out of white paint for the numbers. They used black instead, everyone liked it, and now they use black again for the playoffs.
If you squint hard enough, the field looks black-and-gold in December, which almost exactly matches the school colors.
A curling analogy?!
The Golden Lions have about 85 high school football players when you count the JV. The school’s total enrollment is 820, and about half of those are boys. That means that roughly a fifth of the boys in the school play football. Friday nights are embedded in their DNA, ever since Shelby began playing football in 1910.
“My dad played,” Hamrick, the UNC recruit, said when asked about his Shelby roots. “Both my uncles played. My cousin. I’d come to games on Friday nights and play right near the goalpost, thinking about when it would be my turn.”
It helps that the place has only had six head coaches in the past 85 years. Roots in Shelby thread themselves under U.S. 74. Wilbanks is only in his third year as the head man, but before that he was a Shelby assistant for a dozen more. He also earns the title as the first football coach I’ve ever heard use a curling analogy to describe his job (although he makes sure to credit his wife for coming up with the original line).
“You know in the Olympics, in curling, when there’s that thing that looks like a big puck going down the ice and there’s the guy with the broom, just keeping it on the right path?” Wilbanks said. “That’s me, the guy with the broom. I just want to keep that puck moving in the right direction.”
The puck — it’s actually called a stone or a rock in curling, but let’s not quibble — is certainly moving in the right direction at Shelby. A new fieldhouse, which will cost somewhere in the low seven figures, is on the verge of being built. Community boosters like Mike Willis will help with the construction and, in their spare time, pressure-wash the entire stadium and run the Thursday night supper club.
The Shelby players? They’re mostly fine high school players, with a blue-chipper or two sprinkled in the mix. It’s not like Shelby is turning out NFL players every year, or even a lot of Division 1 players. The best football player ever from the Shelby area was NFL hall of famer Bobby Bell, but the future Kansas City Chief outside linebacker attended the all-Black Cleveland High in Shelby in the late 1950s, prior to integration.
This year, Hamrick has been recruited to UNC and defensive end Santana Hopper has accepted a scholarship offer at Appalachian State. Some of the younger players — Shelby starts seven sophomores as the pipeline keeps churning — may eventually end up with D-1 offers.
“But the way we’ve done it,” Wilbanks, the head coach, said, “is we’ve had a lot of kids play in college at places like Wingate or Lenoir-Rhyne. And when you get a bunch of those kinds of kids, that makes a difference.”
Shelby’s big change
Not everything is encased in amber in Shelby. There’s a new casino going up in nearby Kings Mountain that has people excited. And the Golden Lions run a spread offense that’s heavy on the pass after decades of going with a run-centric, old-school offense that rushed the ball 80% of the time.
It was Ware, the coach from 2011-18, that made that drastic offensive change after years of success with the triple option and wing T. This was a shock to the Shelby eco-system, sort of like if the iconic Shelby restaurant Bridges Barbecue decided to microwave its meat instead of slow-cooking its pork over hickory all night long.
How did the run/pass switch go over with the players and the town?
“Not well, at least not early,” Ware said, laughing. “We had some struggles.”
But then Shelby started winning again — four-peating as state champs from 2013-16 — and the spread has been the Golden Lions’ offense of choice ever since. Wallace-Rose Hill, Saturday’s state title opponent and another small school with a fine football tradition, runs the old-school, run-first offense that Shelby once did. (Wallace-Rose Hill is also in the midst of a COVID outbreak in its football program; for now, the game is still scheduled for Saturday at 3 p.m.)
There will be buses full of Shelby fans headed to Raleigh on Saturday morning for the state championship game, hoping for that 12th NCHSAA title.
Has it always been like this?
Well, not quite. Some of the old-timers in Shelby are still sore in Shelby about 1956, when the Golden Lions went 1-9. And they’re not too hot on 1990, either, because that’s the year Shelby went 4-6.
In every other year, from 1957 on, Shelby has had a winning record. That’s 63 winning seasons in the past 64 years.
“That’s the dream around here, you know,” Hamrick said. “To play for Shelby High School. And to win. That’s everything.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
