It was very disheartening for me to hear that Jefferson County High School will no longer have a varsity football team.
I know football is not what makes a school successful. I know Jefferson County High School is doing many things right, and I am proud to see our school improving academically and moving in a positive direction. There is so much more to education than what happens on a football field.
But in some places, football matters.
For Jefferson County, football has never just been a game. It is part of who we are. It is part of our history, our community, and our identity.
Jefferson County has won six FHSAA state championships. My grandfather, Leo, played on the very first football team in 1929, when it was Monticello High School. My father, Max, played in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He then spent roughly 30 years serving Jefferson County as a head football coach, assistant coach, and athletic director.
And I grew up in that tradition. I graduated from Jefferson County High School in 1985 with a graduating class of around 120 students. To think that today there are only about 150 students in the entire high school is difficult to comprehend. The numbers have changed dramatically.
It also seems that Monticello has increasingly become a bedroom community for Tallahassee. Families live here, but many work and spend much of their time elsewhere. That presents challenges for a small community like ours, and one of those challenges is having enough young men available to field a football team.
But I also believe we need to look deeper than the numbers.
There are young men in our community who could play football but may have responsibilities that we don’t always see. Some may have financial obligations or responsibilities at home that make participating in athletics difficult. We need to find ways to reach those young men, support them, and make sure that football—and all extracurricular activities—are accessible to them.
I am encouraged by the discussion of starting a new middle school football program. That could be an important first step toward rebuilding. But if we want Jefferson County football to return, we cannot simply hope that it happens. We need a plan.
We need the right people at the table—school administrators, coaches, parents, alumni, community leaders, former players, and people who understand the history and importance of Jefferson County football. We need to develop a process and some guidelines that give our young people a real opportunity to participate and give the program a foundation to grow.
This isn’t about pointing fingers. It isn’t about criticizing the school. It is about recognizing a problem and deciding that we are going to do something about it.
I hope and pray that this is not the end of Jefferson County football.
In 1929, my grandfather stepped onto the field as part of the first football team in Monticello. For nearly a century, generation after generation has carried that tradition forward. My father carried it. Many others carried it. And I was fortunate enough to grow up watching that tradition become such an important part of our community.
We have been state champions six times.
We have a history worth preserving.
And we were getting close to celebrating 100 years of Jefferson County football.
I believe we owe it to the generations who came before us—and to the young people who will come after us—to do everything we can to keep that tradition alive.
Football may not define Jefferson County High School.
But for almost 100 years, it has certainly been a part of Jefferson County.
Let’s not let the tradition end. Let’s find a way to bring it back.
Miles Bilinski
Class of 1985