(WHNT) — High school football kicks off across the Tennessee Valley, followed by a full slate of games Friday night, which means this is the last of our Football Friday Countdown series for 2025.
But before we wrap things up, let’s visit with two teams who are squaring off Friday night: Scottsboro and Fort Payne.
Fort Payne High School
We’ll start with the Fort Payne Wildcats, who went 10-3 a season ago and advanced to the third round of the 6A playoffs.
Coach Chris Elmore returns for year eight as the Wildcats are hoping to repeat the success from a season ago.
Elmore says the team focused on strength and speed this offseason and is hoping for a fast start.
“We want to come out of the gate hot, we want to play well early, but our main goal every year is to be playing the best football we can play in November,” Elmore said. “That’s our main goal. We don’t want to not play well early, don’t take that the wrong way, we did not play well early last year part of that was Scottsboro and Guntersville they did a good job just getting after us and taking of business but we learned a lot those first two games and we improved and got better week by week.”
The Wildcats lost a lot of experience at key positions, which Elmore says has been a transition, but the team returns some pieces that make him confident heading into the year.
“We do want to remember that team and we want to be proud of that team but it is time to obviously turn the page and somebody asked me one day how it was going, I said well we lost the school record holder at quarterback, the school record holder at linebacker, the school record holder at receiver and a school record holder at kicker and I’ve lost to really good coaches other than that everything’s going great but so it’s been a really big transitation we lost some really good players,” Elmore said.
Elmore says his team welcomes any doubts people have of them this season.
“Most people are going to count us out and say y’all can’t do it, you’re not going to win this year, you’re going to go 2-8, you’re going to go 3-7, so I’ve kind of challenged these guys that needs to be our motivation.”
Scottsboro High School
Over at Scottsboro, Tyler Vann returns for year two as the Wildcats won a region championship in 2025.
The team advanced to the second round of the playoffs before falling to Ramsay.
With the loss of Jake Jones and other key pieces, Vann has a lot of talent to replace. He says his team is blocking out the noise heading into the year.
“We hear about a lot like we aren’t going to be a very good football team because we lost, we did lose a lot of seniors so our guys get to hear that a little bit so we have that us versuses everybody mentality where it’s just only people that matter what we think is us so don’t listen to the outside noise but our guys have done a really good job this summer of developing their skill and trying to get better especially on the offensive side as well,” Vann said.
Vann says the offense will mix it up more than they did a year ago.
Scottsboro and Fort Payne square off Friday night.
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