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Lions’ title is shaky with stars gone

By: Ward Gossett
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Tim Daniels

Red Bank has been the king so long that few remember any other team wearing a Region 4-4A football crown.

For the first time in three seasons, another team was accorded the preseason bull’s-eye, but Danny Wilson, coach of 2008 favorite Cleveland, wrote Red Bank atop his ballot at the region media day.

“Red Bank is No. 1 till somebody knocks them off,” he said.

The Lions have won four straight region titles and possess a regular-season win streak of 29 games and a four-year record of 41-9. Two of the losses were in the playoffs to eventual state champion Maryville, another was to Knoxville Central in the second round of the playoffs and another was to Austin-East in 2005, their last regular-season setback. The other losses came in 2004, their first region-title year.

Red Bank, though, is looking to replace nearly 5,000 yards of offense in the graduations of quarterback Tim Ledbetter, a three-year starter; Tim Benford and Dominique McDuffie, who were all-state receivers and defensive backs; fullback/linebacker Tracy Sims; and their two biggest linemen, Tylor and Taylor Chambers.

Each has moved on to the college ranks — the Chambers twins to Jacksonville State, Benford to Tennessee Tech, McDuffie to Appalachian State, Sims to Tennessee State and Ledbetter to Cumberland University.

“Because of those guys, we had a lot of answers,” Red Bank coach Tim Daniels said. “Right now we don’t have a lot of answers because we haven’t been under fire.”

The coach likened this month to the 2004 preseason when the Lions were young and still had a lot of questions about talent and depth.

“I don’t want to sell our kids short. We’re thin but we have some quality players. We have to stay healthy,” Daniels said. “I just want to be competitive, and our fans have evolved to where they want the kids to go out there and play hard and get after people and have a chance to win.”

Winning at Red Bank has become as common as a dress code.

“It’s important and, yeah, it’s like it’s everything, but it’s high school football and you can’t be that guy year in and year out,” Daniels said. “To go 60-0 is an oddity, and we aren’t exactly in a one-horse town.”

That said, though, his neck bowed and his eyes sparked at the idea of a region championship being automatically headed elsewhere.

“We all have question marks, but everyone other than Cleveland is an unknown and we’ll all be gunning for Cleveland,” Daniels said. “But our kids are nowhere close to being ready to surrender.

“I picked us fifth (in the coaches’ preseason poll). You can say that’s Lou Holtzian, but I don’t know about us or Walker Valley or these other cats that also had a lot of graduation like we did.”

The Lions have some solid returnees, including defensive tackles Miguel Sanchez and B.J. Jones, nose tackle D.J. Henley, linebacker Terrell Torence and offensive tackle Geoff Kelly. Too, Daniels is high on juniors Malcom Goines and Will Troxler, offensive linemen; Josh Robinson and Shawn McClesky, receivers; and Shamell Brummitt, a fullback/linebacker.

“There is that sense of unknown,” the coach said. “We’re going to have kids playing for us this year that last year I thought might never play for us. They are kids that have seen the light in sixth months’ time, and they have grown and matured. I’m excited about that. I’m excited because we have kids stepping up.

“I’m not about to make excuses for what’s coming up. We have guys who know what it looks like, smells like and tastes like, and hopefully they can take the lessons they’ve learned, because it’s now their turn to form the legacy. These guys have trained like a team that doesn’t want to be forgotten.”

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