Located about four miles away from Macon County High School, sits Sullivan’s Pond, a fishing hole in Lafayette, Tennessee.
For a couple of days at least, it also was home to the uprights of a goalpost at the west end zone at Pat Parker Memorial Field.
The goalpost’s uprights were torn down in celebration of the school’s 43-41 victory against Anderson County in a TSSAA Class 4A football state semifinal. The win marked the first time in school history the football team advanced to the BlueCross Bowl. The Tigers will face Memphis Melrose at 11 a.m. (EST) Saturday in Chattanooga.
“They marched them down the street into town and threw them in the community pond here,” Macon County coach Kyle Shoulders said. “That’s kind of an ongoing issue. I believe they’ve come up missing, and we think some other people in the community got in the pond and got them out and have taken them to their house.”
The mystery uprights may or may not be solved, but one thing is for sure: Shoulders, who is in his seventh season with Tigers, is happy to be back where he began his coaching career and where he went to high school.
‘I’ve got deep roots here’
Kyle Shoulders is no stranger to the state championship game.
He was an assistant at Oakland in 2016, when the Patriots fell 12-9 to Whitehaven in the Class 6A final.
But his coaching roots were humbling.
Shoulders was in college with plans of being a lawyer when his friend, Daniel Cook, called him and offered him an assistant job at Macon County. He quickly became “addicted to coaching” while taking college classes.
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After spending two seasons there, Shoulders took a job 9.3 miles and football worlds away at Red Boiling Springs.
The program had lost 61 games in a row when he arrived in 2009, a streak dating back to the last game of the 2002 season. The Bulldogs won their first two games under Shoulders.
“I’ve got deep roots here in Macon County,” Shoulders said. “At the time, just starting off teaching … it was a good opportunity for me to learn on the run there. There’s just not a drastic number of resources, nor help, really. So it’s the head coach kind of having to do a lot of things. I’d recommend it to anybody just getting into coaching.
One of the things Shoulders did was coach the Red Boiling Springs program to its first playoffs appearance in 2014.
‘A lot of adversity to get to this point’
Macon County didn’t have a youth football league when Shoulders was growing up there, so, as a 6- or 7-year-old, he began playing in Sumner County in the pee-wee league at Westmoreland High School.
Now, he’s reaping the success of a youth program in the place where he grew up.
The Bulldogs are 12-2 this season. Shoulders, an assistant principal and the football coach, has led the Tigers to eight straight wins.
The latest, during which twin running backs Gabe (265 yards, three TDs, interception) and Zach Borders (85 yards, two TDs, two 2-point conversions) combined for 350 yards and five touchdowns on the ground, being the greatest.
“Both are phenomenal football players,” Shoulders said. “Both kids have a remarkable story. One of them, I think, broke his collarbone two or three times. The other one three or four times. So they have been very resilient and have overcome a lot of adversity to get to this point.”
Kyle Shoulders knows the feeling.
Paul Skrbina is a sports enterprise reporter covering the Predators, Titans, Nashville SC, local colleges and local sports for The Tennessean. Reach him at pskrbina@tennessean.com and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) @paulskrbina.
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