Built on Friday Nights

From football’s 1869 beginnings to Lynchburg’s documented 1922 team, it’s the game Moore County gathers to watch

11:21 a.m. Aug. 19, 2026

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

Come Friday evening, the lights will come on at Moore County High School. The band will settle into the stands, cheerleaders will take their places along the sideline, and Jason Brown will stretch Raaaiderrrs about as far as the word will go.

By 7 p.m., Moore County and Community will be lined up across from one another at Doug Price Field, and another season of Raiders football will be underway. Around here, that feels about as natural as August heat. This tradition has some years on it, too.

High school football in Lynchburg can now be documented to at least 1922. That’s the earliest season uncovered so far for Lynchburg High School, predecessor to today’s Moore County High School. The evidence places Lynchburg among the first opponents Tullahoma High School ever faced when the Wildcats started playing football that fall.

It doesn’t prove football began here in 1922. There may yet be a 1920 score buried on microfilm or a 1921 team photograph tucked into somebody’s attic. For now, though, 1922 is solid ground.

That gives Lynchburg a documented football history stretching back more than a century – from leather helmets and muddy fields to Johnny Majors, five Mr. Football winners, generations of Huntland games, and today’s Friday night broadcasts.

But even Lynchburg’s 1922 benchmark came more than half a century after American football’s recognized beginning. To get there, we have to go back to 1869.

Before football knew what it was

If American football has a birthday, Nov. 6, 1869, usually gets the cake.

Rutgers met the College of New Jersey – now Princeton – in New Brunswick, N.J., and won, 6-4. The contest is recognized as the first intercollegiate football game in the United States, though calling it football requires a little imagination by today’s standards.

There were 25 players on each side, and kicking mattered far more than carrying the ball. The game looked a good bit more like soccer than anything played under Friday night lights. The real issue was that nobody had quite settled on what football was supposed to be.

Colleges played different versions under different rules. Some favored soccer. Others leaned toward rugby. Harvard’s games against Canada’s McGill University in 1874 helped push the American game toward carrying the ball, tackling, and the rougher rugby style.

Then Walter Camp got hold of it.

Camp, a Yale player, coach, and rulemaker, did more than anyone else to turn that unruly mixture into American football. The line of scrimmage, the snap, 11 players to a side, the quarterback position, and the system of downs all bear his fingerprints.

That’s why Camp is remembered as the Father of American Football. Rutgers and Princeton played the first recognized college game, and rugby supplied much of the raw material.

About that funny-looking ball

A football isn’t really a pigskin.

Modern footballs are made from cowhide, and even the old leather versions weren’t generally wrapped in pig hide. The nickname likely reaches much farther back, to earlier football games that often used inflated animal bladders – including pig bladders – inside the ball.

Those bladders weren’t exactly precision equipment. They inflated unevenly, which helped produce balls that were less than perfectly round. As the American game moved toward rugby-style carrying, the ball gradually became longer and narrower.

Technically, today’s football is a prolate spheroid.

The forward pass pushed the shape along even more. As throwing became a bigger part of football in the early 20th century, manufacturers slimmed the ball down, making it easier to grip and throw in a spiral. By the 1930s, it looked much more like the football we know today.

The odd shape also gives the game one of its best little quirks. Drop a basketball, and you have a pretty fair idea where it’s headed.

Drop a football, and you’re negotiating.

High school football didn’t wait long

College football was only six years old when high school teams started getting after it.

The first recognized interscholastic game was played May 12, 1875, when Norwich Free Academy met the Bulkeley School for Boys, predecessor to today’s New London High School, in Connecticut. High school football wasn’t some late-arriving little brother to the college game. Teenagers were playing almost from the beginning.

Long before recruiting websites, artificial turf, inflatable tunnels, Hudl highlights, or somebody’s uncle questioning a holding call from 40 yards away, high school boys were already lining up and playing the game.

By the early 1920s, they were doing it in Lynchburg.

Lynchburg was on the field by 1922

The strongest evidence so far comes from a detailed history of Tullahoma High School football built from old newspaper clippings and other records.

Tullahoma launched its football program in 1922, and its first three opponents were Lynchburg, Wartrace, and Decherd. That nails down something important: Lynchburg High School had a football team in the fall of 1922.

It wasn’t a one-off meeting, either. Tullahoma’s historical records show a 14-4-3 mark against Lynchburg during the Wildcats’ first 50 years, evidence of a substantial early rivalry.

And look at who came later. Tullahoma first played Lynchburg in 1922. Shelbyville came onto the schedule in 1923, Manchester in 1924, Winchester in 1925, and Fayetteville in 1929.

So when organized high school football began to take root in this part of southern Middle Tennessee, Lynchburg was already in the first wave.

There is still an asterisk, and it’s an important one. 1922 is the earliest documented season. It is not yet a proven inaugural season.

So far, no earlier Lynchburg game has turned up. That doesn’t mean one wasn’t played. Plenty of small-town newspaper pages never made it online, and plenty more are still sitting on microfilm waiting on somebody patient enough to go hunting.

The exact date and score of that 1922 Tullahoma game haven’t turned up, either. They may be hiding in an old Tullahoma Guardian, surviving copies of Lynchburg’s Falcon, a yearbook, or a clipping folded away in a family Bible.

For now, the historical record supports this much: High school football in Lynchburg can be documented to at least 1922, when Lynchburg High School played Tullahoma during the Wildcats’ inaugural season.

That puts to rest the notion that the local program began in the 1930s. Moore County football goes back farther – maybe quite a bit farther.

Then somebody slipped a player $500

The professional game has its own old receipt.

On Nov. 12, 1892, the Allegheny Athletic Association played the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Allegheny paid former Yale star William “Pudge” Heffelfinger $500 to play, and he returned a fumble for the game’s only touchdown in a 4-0 victory.

The accounting ledger documenting the payment survived. It remains the best evidence for the first known professional football player and is why that game is commonly treated as the birth of professional football.

This was still well before the NFL. Latrobe Athletic Association became the first known team to play a full season with an entirely professional roster in 1897. The organization that became today’s NFL formed in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association and adopted the National Football League name in 1922.

By then, football had figured out something else Americans are pretty good at: making money.

Helmets came because football needed them

Old football photographs can be startling. No face mask. No hard shell. Sometimes no helmet at all.

Lafayette College player George Barclay is commonly credited with developing one of the earliest pieces of headgear designed specifically for football in 1894, a crude leather harness meant in part to protect his ears.

From there came the familiar leather helmets of football’s early decades. College football made helmets mandatory in 1939. The NFL followed in 1943. Leather eventually gave way to hard plastic, face masks, improved padding, suspension systems, and today’s carefully engineered helmets.

Football needed the protection because the early game was brutal. By the opening years of the 20th century, mass formations sent bodies crashing into one another play after play. Serious injuries piled up. Players died.

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, whose son played at Harvard, summoned representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and pushed the sport to clean itself up. A wave of rule changes followed, including one that changed football forever.

In 1906, the forward pass became legal. Saint Louis University’s Bradbury Robinson is generally credited with throwing the first legal one on Sept. 5 of that year. His first attempt fell incomplete, but later in the game Robinson connected with Jack Schneider for a touchdown.

Football had found a way to spread the field, and the game would never be the same.

The huddle began with a secret

At Gallaudet University, where deaf and hard-of-hearing students played football, quarterback Paul Hubbard realized opponents could watch his teammates sign their play calls.

So in 1894, Hubbard pulled the team into a tight circle to shield their hands from the defense. Hubbard is widely credited with creating the football huddle.

More than 130 years later, quarterbacks have helmet radios, coaches hide their mouths behind play sheets, and offenses wave signs ranging from numbers to cartoon characters from the sideline. But every time 11 players gather in a circle between snaps, they’re still using Hubbard’s idea: keep the other bunch from knowing what’s coming.

Football has always had a little poker in it.

Cheerleading started with the fellas

The first organized cheerleader wasn’t holding pom-poms. He was a University of Minnesota student named Johnny Campbell.

In 1898, Campbell stood before Minnesota football fans during a game against Northwestern and led the crowd in an organized cheer. Minnesota is widely recognized as the birthplace of organized cheerleading.

From one student leading a football crowd came squads, stunts, tumbling, dance, and a sideline tradition all its own.

Football finds its soundtrack

Bands were part of football Saturdays long before halftime shows became an attraction of their own.

One of the landmark moments came at the University of Illinois in 1907, when its Regimental Band performed its first marching field show at a football game. On Oct. 19, the band marched formations against the University of Chicago, including an early version of its famous Block I.

Illinois lost, 42-6. Safe to say halftime went better.

From there came fight songs, drum majors, precision drill, high-stepping bands, color guards, dance lines, and the sound of brass and drums rolling through a stadium before anybody ever thinks about kicking off.

Marching bands were still front and center when pro football staged its first AFL-NFL World Championship Game – later known as Super Bowl I – on Jan. 15, 1967. Grambling State University’s famed marching band performed as part of the halftime show.

Long before pop stars took over Super Bowl halftime, marching bands already owned the field.

Radio knocked down the stadium walls

For football’s first half-century, you either went to the game, read about it afterward, or waited until somebody who had been there told the story.

Then radio arrived.

On Oct. 8, 1921, Pittsburgh station KDKA broadcast Pitt against West Virginia in what is widely recognized as the first live radio broadcast of a college football game. All at once, the stadium got a whole lot bigger.

A fan didn’t need a ticket or even need to be in the same town. A voice, some crowd noise, and a little imagination could put you on the 50-yard line.

That relationship between football and radio is still going strong here at home. This season, Moore County Sports Network play-by-play veteran Billy Levengood and color analyst Aiden Webster will call every snap of Raiders football live on WHMT – 95.9 and 105.1.

The equipment is better than it was in 1921. The job is still pretty much the same: tell folks where the ball is, tell them who has it, and when somebody breaks into the open field, try not to trip over your own words.

Then football got a picture

Television followed in 1939.

On Sept. 30, NBC’s experimental New York station W2XBS televised Fordham’s 34-7 victory over Waynesburg in what is generally recognized as the first televised American football game. Almost nobody could watch it.

Three weeks later, on Oct. 22, professional football reached television when the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 23-14, at Ebbets Field. Two cameras covered the game, and only a few hundred television sets in the New York area could pick it up.

From there came instant replay, Monday Night Football, SkyCam, streaming, and Super Bowls that turn an ordinary Sunday into something close to a national holiday.

Not bad for two cameras and a tiny audience.

Hash marks came from one cold night in Chicago

Even the little lines on the field have a story.

In 1932, bitter cold forced an NFL playoff between the Chicago Bears and Portsmouth Spartans indoors at Chicago Stadium. The makeshift field was shorter and much narrower than regulation, so officials moved the ball inward to keep plays away from the walls.

The idea stuck. The NFL introduced hash marks the next season, keeping each snap a set distance from the sideline.

So every time an official spots the football on a hash mark, there’s a little bit of that freezing Chicago night behind it.

Friday night became an institution

For all the money at the top of football – television contracts, NFL franchises, bowl games, sponsorships, fantasy leagues, and recruiting – the game’s widest footprint may still be found beneath high school lights.

During the 2024-25 school year, more than 1.02 million boys played 11-player high school football at more than 14,000 schools nationwide.

And that’s only the roster. Add coaches, officials, trainers, cheerleaders, bands, booster clubs, concessions, equipment companies, broadcasters, sponsors, and all the families piling into vehicles every Friday.

There isn’t one neat national dollar figure for the high school football economy because the money is spread across thousands of schools, associations, businesses, and communities.

You can see its size without a spreadsheet.

Drive through Lynchburg around 6:30 on a Friday night. Woodards starts thinning out. Canterero’s tables turn early. Cars start bending toward the stadium.

Here, the football field is one of the county’s biggest gathering spots. That’s more than a game. It’s part of the town.

Five Raiders reached the top

Moore County hasn’t simply played the game for a long time. It has produced some of Tennessee’s best.

Five Moore County High School players have earned Mr. Football honors:

• 1988 – Todd Logan
• 1992 – Jeff Norman
• 1994 – Wayne Finchum
• 2000 – Brandon Wells
• 2023 – Dawson White

Five Mr. Football honors across 35 years. Not bad for one little county.

Those names are part of why Friday nights carry a little extra weight in Lynchburg. Today’s Raiders aren’t walking into something brand new. They’re taking their turn in a program whose documented roots reach back to 1922 and whose stars have stood among Tennessee’s best.

Every generation gets its Friday nights, then hands them down.

And then there’s Huntland

Some football history belongs in record books. Some of it gets handed down across supper tables and front porches.

And then there’s Moore County-Huntland, a rivalry that deserves its own shelf in the annals of Raiders football – especially once the Majors family enters the story.

Sewanee’s Athletics Hall of Fame lists Shirley Majors as coaching at Lynchburg in 1944, 1945, and 1946, followed by two seasons at old Franklin County and eight at Huntland from 1949-56.

He was no ordinary high school coach. Shirley Majors was a charter member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. His roots ran deep in Moore County, too: He was born in Ridgeville, raised in Beach Hill, and attended Marble Hill Grammar School.

Then came 1949.

On the Lynchburg side was freshman tailback Johnny Majors. On the Huntland sideline was his father.

Lynchburg won, with Johnny scoring touchdowns on three consecutive possessions to help carry the Raiders past Shirley’s Hornets.

Now there’s a family supper conversation.

Johnny was born in Moore County, too – in a house that stood where the Moore County Public Library sits today. The next summer, Shirley moved the family to Huntland, and Johnny went with him.

Johnny led the state in scoring for three consecutive years before earning a scholarship to Tennessee, where he starred at tailback and launched a football career that made the Majors name known far beyond either end of the Moore County-Huntland road.

Johnny was hardly the only Majors son to leave a mark on the game. Joe Majors quarterbacked Florida State; Bill Majors played tailback and safety at Tennessee before joining the Volunteers’ coaching staff; Larry Majors played for Shirley at Sewanee; and Bobby Majors became an All-America safety at Tennessee. Bill’s life was cut short in 1965 when he was one of three UT coaches killed in a car-train accident.

From Lynchburg to Huntland, Knoxville, Tallahassee, and Sewanee, the Majors name became stitched into Southern football.

Around Moore County, though, one question has always hung over that history: What if? ... What if Shirley Majors had stayed? What if Johnny had played out his high school career as a Raider?

Nobody gets to rewrite the scorebook. But more than 75 years after a freshman Johnny Majors scored three touchdowns for Lynchburg against a Huntland team coached by his father, folks around here can still wonder.

Some games end at the final whistle. Moore County-Huntland has never been quite that simple.

And somebody better bring something to eat

Football may have been born in New Jersey, but the South figured out pretty quickly what to do with the parking lot.

Three foods belong in any serious Southern tailgate conversation.

Barbecue gets the first-team nod. Pulled pork, chopped pork, ribs, sliders – pick your version and argue about the sauce with somebody else.

Pimento cheese works on crackers, sandwiches, celery, burgers – just about anywhere you put it.

Then there are sausage balls, which may be the perfect tailgate food: sausage, cheese, biscuit mix, easy to carry, easier to eat, and gone before anybody admits how many they’ve had.

That’s the South. We can agree on football. Lunch may require overtime.

And Friday, we do it again

The players at Rutgers and Princeton in 1869 wouldn’t recognize much of the game we watch now.

But here in Lynchburg, a team that can be traced back at least to 1922 is still putting on the pads. Five Mr. Football winners are already in the family album, and generations of Huntland games need little introduction around here.

On any given Friday, there are voices on the radio, horns in the stands, cheerleaders on the sideline, and people who have watched Raider football long enough to remember when somebody’s daddy wore the same number.

Come Friday, Moore County hosts Community at 7 p.m. to open the 2026 season. Billy Levengood and Aiden Webster will have the microphones live on WHMT. Jason Brown will send Raaaiderrrs rolling across the stadium, the band will strike up, somebody will have something good cooking somewhere, and the stands will start filling.

Then another bunch of Raiders will take its turn, carrying at least 104 years of Lynchburg football with them.

The lights come on, the ball goes in the air, and around here, fall starts to feel like fall again.