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LANETT — It’s not unusual for Friday night lights to be taking place in Lanett at two different locations on the same evening this time of year. It’s usually when the Lanett High Panthers and the Springwood Wildcats are at home.

This took place again in Lanett this past week but with a different twist. The Lanett Panthers were at home with a football game versus Handley High of Roanoke. Springwood’s Friday game was on the road and got delayed to Monday due to the possibility of Hurricane Helene coming to east Alabama.

So where was the second version of Friday night lights?

It was at the office of Johnson, Caldwell & McCoy in downtown Lanett. It wasn’t an actual game but a walk down memory lane of the LHS football season of some 50 years ago.

Chambers County Attorney Skip McCoy was a member of that team and hosted a get together in a superbly remodeled ground floor space of the law office. He plans to add a finishing touch to the big new meeting place: a big black and gold L and call it the L Room.

“Friday night lights were shining brightly in downtown Lanett last Friday,” McCoy told The Valley Times-News on Monday. “It was a great evening. It was so good to be with all the guys again and especially good to be with our coach, Dan Washburn. My wife Cathy and my daughter Mallorie did a great job of having the room all decorated in black and gold. Everyone liked that.We had such a good time reminiscing about the good old days. Coach Washburn was like a second father to all of us.”

Friday night lights is a term that refers to what high school football means to small town America, especially in the Deep South. The spirit of this was popularized in a TV show of that name that ran between 2006 and 2011.

The team in the fictional show was known as the Dillon Panthers. Last Friday was all about the Lanett Panthers.

Members of the 1974 Panthers who were present for the reunion were Randall Aikens, Doug Bonner, Ken Bozeman, Mike Davis, Jimmy Hill, Randy Hill, Larue Overton, Jamey Siggers, David Walls, Freddie Williams, Byrd Worthy and of course, host Skip McCoy.

The two guys named Hill aren’t related, but both grew up in the Lanett Nazarene Church. After graduating from Lanett High in the spring of 1975, both went on to attend the Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, Tennessee and became ordained ministers. “Jimmy was one of our captains and our team chaplain,” McCoy said. “He’s now the pastor of a large church in Oklahoma. Randy Hill lives in Westminster, California, where he has a large church. He’s very good at counseling people with grievance issues.”

Jimmy Hill once met former Alabama head coach Gene Stallings while in Oklahoma. He told him he had grown up and played high school football in Alabama. Stallings asked him where in Alabama and Hill told him Lanett. “You must have been one of Dan Washburn’s boys,” Stallings told him, knowing of Washburn’s reputation. “I was back then and still am,” Hill told him. “We will always be.”

Two former Panther teammates who were at the reunion are retired military. Doug Bonner retired as a lieutenant colonel and now lives in the Huntsville, Ala. area. Freddie Williams served with the Army for many years in Europe. He also worked for IBM as an IT specialist. He now owns a photography business in Atlanta.

David Walls today lives in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He’s had a very successful career in the insurance business. Ironically, he started out in that field in the same office that’s now the L Room. He was with Liberty National at the time, which had a ground-floor office on North Lanier Avenue.

Byrd Worthy worked a number of years for the Georgia-Alabama Wholesale Company. He’s now retired and lives in Panama City Beach, Florida.

Larue Overton owns his own glass business in Cocoa Beach, Florida. He started out at a Lanett glass company owned by his dad, Marvin Overton.

The quarterback on the ’74 team, Jamey Siggers, is retired after being widely known in the local area for the great-tasting stew he made at Papa’s Que & Stew.

The starting center on that team, Randall Aikens, still lives in the local area. He recently retired from Batson-Cook after a 40-year career as a construction superintendent. He’s also worked on construction projects for P.F. Moon & Company.

“Randall is great with construction work,” McCoy said. “He did a great job in renovating a downstairs office into the L Room. To look at it now you’d never know there were two offices there divided by a brick wall. He did such a good job in making it look like the big conference room was built that way from the start.”

“Everyone in our group had successful careers,” McCoy said. “They are terrific gentlemen and good people. We all owe a lot to our mentor and second dad, Dan Washburn. He set the bar high for us.”

In the VT-N’s pre-season football magazine, Gridiron 2024, McCoy took our an ad featuring a photo of the senior players on the 1974 team and thanking Coach Washburn. “Thank you, Coach Washburn, for building a team that has stood together for 50 years,” the ad reads, “and teaching us how to be winners both on the field and in life itself. We salute you!”

McCoy had lots of items from the 1974 season on display at last Friday’s reunion. One of them was his playbook. Coach Washburn had one made for every member of the team. McCoy said he became emotional when he read what Coach Washburn had written on the first page of the playbook. It was something he wanted each player to read and remember:

“Quitting comes easy for most people,” it reads. “Many do not want to pay the price to be a winner. It requires little effort to be a loser – and anyone who tries will be most successful. The boy who sets his mind to do what is required of him in order to be a winner is not only the type of boy we are looking for, but he will get the most from the program. Those who stay will be champions and will become winners not only on the football field but in life itself.”

Now in his eighties, Washburn gets around well for his age and still has a sharp mind. He very much enjoyed being around players from that 1974 season and asked them all kinds of questions when they gathered for a 6 p.m. dinner in the L Room

‘We showed films of some of the games we played that year.” McCoy said. “He amazed us telling us what the play was called and why we used it in that situation. It brought back to us how he could get us hyped up for our next game. He had us eating and sleeping that game long before it was played.”

Lanett opened the season that year against heavily favored Auburn High, the three-time defending Border Conference champion. “Four of the six members of the Valley Times-News guesspert panel had us losing to Auburn. Tom Walls and Brad Jones were the only ones to pick us to win,” McCoy recalled.

The game meant a lot to Washburn. The previous year Washburn had coached at Prattville High and Auburn had beaten them 55-0. He wanted to have a different outcome now that he was back in Lanett, and he did. The Panthers won 21-6. Later on that year they were underdogs to Opelika High and won 18-7.

“It meant a lot to us to see Coach Washburn and to tell him how much he meant to us, to thank him for the impact he had on our lives.” McCoy said. “It was Friday Night Lights for each one of us.”

Prior to the dinner, a moment of silence was held for a teammate, Jim McAlister, and two assistant coaches, James Hardy and Billy Atkinson, who have passed away.

After dinner in the L Room, the group took the short trip over to Morgan-Washburn Stadium to see the first half of Lanett High’s homecoming game versus Handley.

Members of the team and Coach Washburn were recognized in an on-field ceremony prior to the kickoff.

“It was so good to stand next to that big L at the center of the field,” McCoy said. “I couldn’t help but remember the great job Richard Ballard always did in getting the field ready for the next home game. He would always have that big football with an L in it at midfield and did a great job having the black-and-gold checkerboards in the end zones.”

McCoy handled Ballard’s estate when he passed away a few years ago. His widow, Jean, gave him some scrapbooks he’d put together over the years featuring Lanett kids he’d coached in rec league sports.

“Richard loved Lanett and had so many old photographs and clippings from the Valley Times-News. He coached us in midget football,” McCoy said.

“I think we will long remember how much members of our 1974 team enjoyed being together on Friday,” McCoy added. “The camaraderie we built up back then is still going strong. It meant a lot to us when Coach Washburn told us that the get together was really special to him. What he had instilled in us 50 years ago is still strong in us today.”

McCoy’s playbook from the 1974 season includes a poem by Walter D. Windle. It’s entitled “It’s All in a State of Mind.” Coach Washburn wanted them to remember the words and keep them close to heart. It goes:

“If you think you are beaten, you are; If you think you dare not, you won’t; If you’d like to win but don’t think you can, It’s almost a cinch you won’t. If you think you will lose, you’re lost; For out in the world you’ll find Success begins with a fellow’s will; It’s all in state of mind. For many a game is lost Ere even a play is run, And many a coward fails Ere even his work is begun. Think big and your deeds will grow. Think small and you’ll fall behind; Think that you can and you will; It’s all in a state of mind. If you think you are outclassed, you are; You’ve got to think high to rise; You’ve got to be sure of yourself before You can ever win a prize. Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger and faster man; But sooner or later, the man who wins Is the fellow who thinks he can.