GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Friday evening, as the Clay High School Blue Devils and Oakleaf High Knights football teams were charging through their season looking to be one of the teams moving toward a playoff berth for the 2017 season, another championship team was amassing in the west end zone.

Many players from the Clay High 1967 Class B Championship team were honored on their 50th anniversary of school’s lone state championship.

The head coach for that historic season, Harvey Lofton, said “Oh it’s wonderful! It brings back a lot of memories. Some of them haven’t changed in looks; I can recognize the face but the body has changed. I could play them all as tackles and guards now!”

Lofton was not short on memories of the magic year. Back in the day- Bolles was the local team to beat and Clay did it 33-0. The team had six shut-outs and did it with a very small crew.

“We only had 19 kids on the team so we couldn’t do a full scrimmage at practice,” said Lofton. “So I had three kids got in trouble at school, so I gave them a choice; they could go home suspended for a week or come out for football. We added three players to have 22- we could scrimmage!”

Many things changed over the years and Lofton as well as quarterback Don Bowles were quick to point out.

“We were more straight ahead,” said Bowles. “Not as many formations and wide outs. We ran a Wing, an I, and a T formation. They all listened to the quarterback for the play and today they all look for signals from the sideline. I had one play and a check off. They are more like college now.”

Asked about his arm back in the day, Bowles said, “We could throw the ball a ways. If we had to we could throw the ball, but we didn’t have to. If we threw two-three times a game it was a lot. I could throw it 70 yards. We were a running team. Greg Looney was my tailback and he scored 24 running touchdowns that year.”

Lofton chimed in about Looney- “I could put Looney anywhere on the field. I played him at Tackle in the North-South game and he put John Reeves on his butt! John completed two passes all night. I could play him at any spot on the field. Running back, Center, Guard, Linebacker, whatever. He was rough.”

Both Bowles and Lofton also acknowledged that the team already lost seven players that aren’t with us anymore. They were truly grateful to get the team back together in front of the fans.

One preseason difference, according to coach Ron Riddle, was that the 1967 Blue Devils didn’t have much to work with as compared to the much more advanced weightlifting equipment now in the Clay field house.

“They have all the weights and all, we didn’t have that stuff,” said Riddle, who noted weight lifting was done with concrete blocks tied to bars and self-made blocking sleds. “Most of the guys were country guys, they were naturally strong anyways, it didn’t cause a problem. Now they got everything. Videos, recording stuff. We had old tiny (8mm) films and you had to break them things down and they were pretty rough.”

During the halftime ceremony, Clay High Athletic Director Jay Stilianou honored each returning player with a mid-field plaque presentation and had them all posed for a team picture where Doug Jones and Brian Wright wore their 50-year-old jerseys; No. 22 for Jones, No. 66 for Wright.