The following story was written by Todd Holcomb for the AJC in March 2008:
Avondale‘s football players took a field trip last week to find their glory days. They found them at the grave of Calvin Ramsey. ”They wanted to sit far away, but we made them sit in a circle,” said Bobby Burgess, who played in 1969 on Ramsey’s last Avondale team. “There was no laughing, no nothing. I told them the community thinks that their school is dead, just like the man whose grave you’re sitting on. And can’t nobody bring it back but you.”
Avondale High School, which won more than 100 games in the decade of the 1960s, is the most profound riches-to-rags story in Georgia football history.
There have been no winning seasons and nine head coaches since 1989. Avondale‘s record dropped to 0-2 Friday against Druid Hills, which broke a 20-game losing streak at North DeKalb Stadium.
But help and caring have arrived.
An alumni group, led by some of Ramsey’s former players, many who hadn’t been back to Avondale in decades, has raised $35,000 this summer.
The instigators are Stacy Burnette, a probation officer from the class of 1976, and his best friend, Perry Stringer, a former Avondale player under Crawford Kennedy, the coach who succeeded Ramsey and won the school’s third state title in 1976.
“It has been a brutal eye-opener into what disarray this program has fallen under, ” Stringer said. “These kids didn’t have anything to work with. No practice equipment, no blocking sleds. The field was dirt.”
In recent years, some players have been turned away because the program didn’t have enough helmets or practice jerseys. Others practiced in tennis shoes.
DeKalb County supplies only the minimum. Booster clubs must furnish the rest.
Avondale is one of metro Atlanta’s poorer and more transient school districts and hasn’t been able to raise money on its own in years.
The city of Avondale Estates remains affluent, but most children there attend private schools. All white in the 1960s, Avondale is now 90 percent African-American.
“If they just went to Avondale and spoke to the kids, they’d find they’re no different than anywhere else,” said Burnette, one of the few alumni from the 1970s who still lives in the community where he grew up. “I’m partial. I think they’re better. I don’t have anybody I’m assigned on probation that goes to Avondale.”
The money the alumni have raised has been used to buy blocking sleds, agility ropes, a gauntlet, foot-work ladders and much more in practice equipment. Game shoes cost $2,000. Pregame meals are $4,000.
The new coach, Michael Carson, inherited three pieces of practice equipment. “A one-man sled, a chute and a five-man sled that looked like it might’ve been here with Coach Ramsey, ” he joked.
Brad Johnson, an Avondale alum who played at Georgia in the 1960s, paid for video equipment and a summer training camp at Rock Eagle.
Carson, a former Buford player, was an assistant at Class AAAAA power M.L. King last season. He says Avondale‘s equipment now might be better than MLK’s or any other school in DeKalb County.
Stringer and Burnette have brought in Burgess and Flem Mitchell, former Ramsey players. Burgess and Mitchell come to all the games and practices. They know the players’ names.
Mitchell listed the heights and weights of several players as he watched Friday’s game, bragging that a handful could play college ball.
Burgess, Mitchell, Billy Bourn and John Plageman, all former Ramsey players, grilled out for the team after Thursday’s practice — 160 hamburgers and five gallons each of baked beans and potato salad.
Afterward, the players watched the movie “Miracle” about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team.
“If we can get just one boy to understand there are people who care about them, all our efforts would be justified,” Stringer said.
The trip to Ramsey’s grave had an impact, the new coach said, even if it has not been seen on the scoreboard.
“That’s the quietest bus ride home I’ve ever been on in my life,” Carson said.
After Avondale lost its opener the next day, one of Avondale‘s starters called Mitchell and apologized. His voice was breaking, but Mitchell reassured him.
“It was inspiring,” senior Courtney Brantley said of the graveyard trip. “It makes you take more pride in what we’re doing. It shows you they care and makes you want to live up to how they used to be.”
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