Silver Bluff High School brought three Aiken County communities together when it opened in 1981. Friday night’s homecoming festivities will see one unified community celebrate 30 years of Bulldog pride.
Clayton Chriswell started the football program the year the school opened. Two of his assistant coaches, Al Lown and Rick Knight, are now head football coaches in Aiken County. Within six years, the school had its first of five football state championships.
“Coach Chriswell decided the football program was going to bring the communities closer together,” said Lown, now in his 19th season as Silver Bluff’s head coach. “There’s been a great tradition here ever since.”
The Bulldog program has produced a stretch of rarely experienced consistency. According to scfootballhistory.com, Silver Bluff has posted a winning record in 29 of its 30 football seasons. The lone losing season, 1982, saw the team go 5-7.
The Bulldogs’ annual success is known around the state. When Lee Sawyer took the football job at Strom Thurmond High School in 2004, he contacted Silver Bluff for a potential nonregion game.
“I remember talking to another coach back then and he asked me about it,” Sawyer said. “He said, ‘Silver Bluff? Are you crazy?’ I kind of got to thinking that myself. Why did I do that?”
The two teams have played every season since and have grown into one of the top rivalry games in Class AA. Sawyer has always put together challenging nonregion schedules for his teams, and Silver Bluff fit into that category.
“They were the image of what I wanted us to be,” Sawyer said. “Play hard, play clean and be a tough football team. You know you’re going to have to play your best to beat them.”
Silver Bluff’s swagger hasn’t been as strong recently. The Bulldogs suffered a 52-7 pounding to Strom Thurmond last month in the middle of a rare three-game losing streak. A region-opening, six-point loss to Swansea two weeks ago has threatened Silver Bluff’s chances at continuing its streak of five consecutive region championships.
Injuries haven’t helped the small team of fewer than 30 players. Senior quarterback Cordrea Tankersley and lineman Jimmy Holmes haven’t been fully healthy in weeks, and the team will play the rest of the season without senior tailback A.J. Washington, who suffered a knee injury.
The injuries meant the majority of last week’s starting lineup was made of sophomores and freshmen, but Lown said he made sure the team knew about their school’s rich tradition before taking the field.
“Last week we walked through the school and looked at the state championship teams on the wall and the trophies,” he said. “I told them we’re going back to the tradition of how this program was first built with basic fundamentals.”
Lown’s young team responded with what he said was the best week of practice this season and a 23-7 region win over Wade Hampton.
The Bulldogs will face a more difficult challenge this week when they play host to an Edisto team that knocked off previously undefeated Barnwell last week, but Lown said he feels positive about the way his team responded to the injuries and the three-game losing streak.
“We’re extremely optimistic right now,” he said. “There’s no sense crying. I told them, ‘We’re in the ditch and nobody’s going to reach a hand out and pull you up, so we’re going back to our roots and show that Bulldog pride.’ ”
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