Hillcrest High School football has come a long way during past decade

Hillcrest head coach Clinton Smith, right, receives game ball.

Hillcrest High School’s football program has come a long way.

I began working at the newspaper in Evergreen during the summer of 2007, just a few weeks before the start of football season. Maurice Belser was Hillcrest’s head football coach back then, and many of Hillcrest’s current assistant coaches were on his staff. Hillcrest was in Class 4A at that time and went 4-6 in 2007.

The 2008 season started out with a huge, 21-20, upset win over a Class 6A Theodore team that featured future two-time All-American linebacker C.J. Mosley, who was a first-round draft pick out of Alabama and still plays in the NFL for the Baltimore Ravens. Hillcrest won only two more games that season, finishing up 3-7 overall.

The next season, Belser’s last at Hillcrest, the Jags went 1-9 overall, recording just one win over W.S. Neal. Despite what was happening with the team, I hated to see Belser leave. I had a lot of respect for Coach Belser, and I think he always had the best interest of the kids at heart.

The hiring of Alabama coaching legend Larry Boykin prior to the start of the 2010 season altered Conecuh County sports history forever. That season, Hillcrest went 7-4 overall, their best record in a decade up to that time, and they made the playoffs for the first time in eight seasons.

Around this same time, a young assistant coach named Clinton Smith was hired at Hillcrest and began to make a name for himself in the coaching ranks. I first got to known Coach Smith, a native of Butler who played quarterback at Alabama State, during his time as Hillcrest’s head baseball coach. I’ve dealt with a lot of coaches in my nearly 20 years of covering sports, and my sense then was that there was something special about Coach Smith.

Boykin remained at Hillcrest four more seasons and took the Jags to the playoffs twice more before officially retiring. In the meantime, in 2013, Smith left Hillcrest to serve as offensive coordinator at Carver High School in Montgomery. It was at Carver, under head coach Billy Gresham, that Smith sharpened his play-calling skills against some of the toughest big city teams the state has to offer.

Smith returned to Hillcrest in June 2015 as Hillcrest’s head football coach and the rest, as they say, is history. In his first season at Hillcrest, Smith led the Jags beyond the second round of the playoffs for the first time in school history and upset T.R. Miller in Brewton in the state quarterfinals, arguably one of the greatest games in Hillcrest history. The following week, Hillcrest played in its first-ever state semifinal round game only to come up short against budding rival, Bayside Academy.

Smith took the Jags to the playoffs again in 2016 as Hillcrest retooled for its historic 2017 season. Not only did Smith lead Hillcrest back to the semifinals, but this time they won, earning Hillcrest’s first-ever appearance in the state finals. Of course, everyone knows how that turned out, as Hillcrest defeated Randolph County to become the first team in Conecuh County history to ever win a state title in football.

Currently, in three years as a head coach, Smith has an overall record of 27-14 and an amazing, almost unheard of record of 9-2 in playoff games.

Maybe best of all, Smith is just 34 years old, so he’s a young coach with a lot of football seasons (and victories) ahead of him. In the end, I just want to say that I’m proud of Coach Smith and his staff and what they accomplished this season. My feeling is that this is the start of more to come.