They haven’t won a game in four years. Why this SC football team never lacks hope
Last winter, DeMarcus Simons saw a job posting that caught his eye. Before he hit send on his application, though, he had to do some research.
Simons, then coaching at Great Falls High School an hour north of Columbia, went to MaxPreps.com, opened up the website’s final power rankings for South Carolina high school football teams last season and started scrolling.
And scrolling.
And scrolling.
And scrolling.
Finally, on Page 10 of 11, he found his future employer. The Eau Claire High School Shamrocks had gone 0-9 in 2022, and they ranked No. 239 out of the 255 public and independent schools tracked by MaxPreps — dead last among teams in their classification. They also had a computer-generated power ranking over 100 points lower than the No. 1 team.
“On paper, this was the worst job in the state,” Simons said. “The worst in the state. … But just the confidence that I have in myself, I said, ‘You know what? That’s something for me to do. I’m gonna challenge myself.’ ”
And what a challenge it is: not just for Simons, 36, hired as Eau Claire’s football coach in March, but for every player and coach and administrator trying to help turn around the fortunes of a school that — despite its Irish nickname — has routinely been one of the unluckiest in the state.
After a shutout loss in Thursday’s season opener, the Shamrocks are on a 26-game losing streak dating back to November 2019, the longest active streak in the state by a South Carolina High School League team by five games. They haven’t made the SCHSL playoffs since 2019.
And their streak of seasons without a winning record — 37 years, dating back to 1986 — is older than their coach and at least twice as old as every player on the Eau Claire roster.
The Shamrocks are, statistically, one of the least successful teams in football-rich South Carolina over the past 40 years. Yet, there they were on a recent day in north Columbia, decked out in green, white and orange jerseys, practicing right below the SCHSL’s heat advisory cut-off point of 92 degrees and pondering a probing question.
Given all that, why still do it?
“Just not giving up on my school,” junior receiver/kicker Dylane Avila said. “I know we can get a win, especially with the new coaches. I just know that they can turn around the system.”
“So we can make a change at Eau Claire,” junior receiver/defensive back Aden Price said. “Make history.”
An ‘extremely tough’ job
Eau Claire — pronounced “Oh Clare” and French for “clear water” — opened its doors to Columbia students in 1949 and became a four-year high school in the 1970s.
And over those decades, it’s not like the cupboard has been bare athletically, according to athletic director Jamil Canada, who’s worked at Eau Claire since 2001.
The Shamrocks are, most notably, a boys basketball power, ranking third all-time in SCHSL history with seven state championships. Eau Claire was home to the late, great George Glymph, a legendary coach who won five of those titles, and NBA All-Star center Jermaine O’Neal. The school’s track and field teams and cross country teams have also been consistently strong.
But that hasn’t been the case for football in a long time.
Eau Claire rubbed elbows with a few famous coaches on their rise to greater things, including former Furman/N.C. State coach Dick Sheridan, former Furman coach Jimmy Satterfield and former Furman/Citadel/East Carolina coach Art Baker (all three of them are in the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame).
The team appeared in four state championships from 1962-70 (twice under Baker, once under Satterfield) and won its lone state title in 1968. Since then, though, Eau Claire has been trying to recapture that magic on the gridiron. And it hasn’t been a few off years. It’s been a few off decades.
The Shamrocks’ last winning season came in 1986 when they went 6-5 under coach Gerald Kelly and lost in the first round of the playoffs, according to the South Carolina High School Football History online database.
They’ve won five or fewer games in every season since, with zero postseason wins in six playoff appearances and — specific to the 2000s — a new coach every two to three years, it seems.
Eau Claire’s current losing streak of 26 games only ranks fourth among the worst in school history, per SCHSFH data. The team lost 31 straight games from 2012-15, 29 straight from 1997-2000 and 28 straight from 1980-82 (and, for good measure, 19 straight from 2001-03).
In January 2022, The State asked high school football coaches to anonymously evaluate the best and toughest jobs among the 30-plus schools in the Columbia and Lexington area. You can guess which list Eau Claire — which has gone 11-104 since 2011 — popped up on.
“Extremely tough rebuild and goes through too many coaches,” one coach said.
“Lack of support, ability to win,” another said.
A third, speaking broadly about Eau Claire and Columbia and C.A. Johnson, two other programs in the Richland 1 school district, said: “Funding is a major issue and lack of a budget for head coaches to work with. Three schools with potential to be great but major social issues have them all limited.”
Adding perspective
Canada, who actually worked on Eau Claire’s football staff in his early years at the school, doesn’t see the Shamrocks as having potential to be great.
He thinks they already are.
As the school year begins and the season kicks off, the longtime athletic director is happy to brag on Eau Claire’s roughly 580 high school students. The group has persevered and pushed through a number of socioeconomic factors that, in context, make the results of football games seem far less important.
About 90% of Eau Claire’s students are Black, Canada said. They operate as one of Richland 1’s English as a second language (or ESL) center schools and bring in a good number of Latino students; a handful, most notably Avila, will be contributors for the football team this season.
Eau Claire — one of seven traditional high schools in Richland 1 — also takes in foster children and children from the Epworth Children’s Home, a nearby group home that provides care for kids who might have a family crisis or be a victim of abuse or neglect, as students.
“We try to be inclusive of everybody,” Canada said.
More than anything else, Canada said, Eau Claire’s struggles have boiled down to a numbers game — things an athletic director or a coach can’t necessarily control.
The last time Eau Claire made the state championship game in 1970, it was in Class 4A, the largest of four SCHSL classifications at the time. That held until 1992, when the Shamrocks dropped from 4A to 3A. When Canada first started working there in 2011, Eau Claire had about 1,100 students.
Now it’s about half. In a ZIP code where approximately 31% of residents are below the poverty line — more than double the Columbia metro area rate and South Carolina-wide rate — “the population of the school keeps dwindling,” Canada said, with minimal real estate development playing a factor.
“We finally moved to 2A (in 2008), but we have not really had too many housing developments built in the 29203 community,” Canada said. “So if you think about Columbia, everything is White Knoll, Lexington area, northeast Summit area. So that’s where the new housing communities are being built, and that’s where new people are mostly moving in.”
And Eau Claire’s not just on an island. Ben Lippen, a private Christian school three miles away that competes in the South Carolina Independent School Association, has become a popular choice for families moving into the few new neighborhoods popping up in Eau Claire’s attendance zone.
W.J. Keenan, C.A. Johnson and Columbia high schools — other Richland 1 schools — all sit within seven miles of Eau Claire, too, meaning that between public and private schools there’s “a lot of competition” for students, Canada said.
The team often finds itself competing with its own band for students, too.
The Marching Shamrocks get requested for just about every major parade and event in Columbia, Canada said, and they’ve traveled as far as New Orleans and New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Toting a trumpet for Eau Claire’s regionally renowned band is often just as much of an honor as a varsity letter.
Eau Claire does have a strong relationship with its feeder middle schools, Gibbes and Alcorn, both of which sponsor football and play games at the high school. Gibbes even won a recent middle school state championship.
Still, it adds up. Eau Claire’s never had to skip out on a varsity season due to low participation like some schools in neighboring North Carolina have done, but Canada estimates the Shamrocks haven’t been able to field a JV football team, a crucial developmental tool for varsity teams, since 2014.
In 2019, The State reported, Eau Claire had 21 players practice and 29 players dress for a routine game week. When Simons held his first spring practices as coach this March, on the heels of an 0-9 season, he had 16 or 17 players show up consistently.
Simons is an optimist by nature. But that lack of participation was jarring, he said, and rattled him during the first two weeks of his tenure.
He thought: “Is this something I really want to do?”
‘Clean slate’ in 2023
But this was a “new day, new way,” as Simons has been calling it, and soon enough that message started resonating with more and more Eau Claire students.
As spring turned to summer and summer turned to fall, those 16 players on the first day of spring practice had swelled to 20. Then 25. Then 30.
On Wednesday, the eve of the season opener, Simons had 39 players on his opening-day roster — easily one of the school’s best turnouts over the past decade, if not longer.
Saqohn Canzater, a senior defensive lineman, credited Simons and his assistant coaches — the entire staff is new — for putting in the work to more than double March’s numbers.
“I’ve been here for three years, and it’s kind of been ups and downs,” Canzater said. “We had not a lot of people come out. We had athletes that had potential but had to play both sides, play positions they didn’t want to play.”
But with the institution of what Simons calls his three D’s — discipline, dedication and determination — as guiding principles, Canzater said he feels a “new sense of hope” from a program that hasn’t won a game since Nov. 1, 2019.
In the Midlands, an area that routinely produces state championship teams and Power Five football recruits, Eau Claire’s struggles have become a bit of a punchline.
“It’s been frustrating, but I just let them talk, you know?” senior quarterback Samir Holloway said. “I just let them talk. We’ll just show them on Fridays.”
“We kind of use that talk-back and all that negativity as motivation for us to push further,” senior running back/linebacker Lamar Eddy added. “Try to get those people to shut up and show them what Eau Claire’s actually, really about.”
Contextually, the Shamrocks have been trending in an upward direction. Coach Michael Kelly (2018-20) led the school to a four-win season in 2018 and a 2019 playoff appearance (albeit at 1-10, with an automatic bid for finishing fourth in the conference).
Coach Shaq Hilton (2021-22) went 0-16, but his Shamrocks played in four games decided by 10 points or fewer and lost two games by a single touchdown in 2022.
Although the majority of Eau Claire’s starters will still play both ways — they’re not 100 players deep like cross-town powerhouse Dutch Fork just yet — the general thinking is that with more bodies and more depth, more two-score games become one-score games and a few more bounces go Eau Claire’s way.
Simons, a Columbia native who played quarterback at Ridge View High School and Benedict College, engineered a similar turnaround at Great Falls, a 1A school. In 2021, he led the team to a 7-4 record and its first playoff appearance in over a decade.
That may be easier said than done in Region 4-2A, which Simons has jokingly compared to the SEC, considering five of the seven teams in Eau Claire’s region made the playoffs last year.
A better measuring stick will be the Shamrocks’ three-game non-conference schedule, which includes two games against 1A opponents and got off to an equally rocky start. Eau Claire was gashed for over 400 yards rushing and failed to score a touchdown in its season opener, a 44-0 road loss to 1A school Hunter-Kinard-Tyler on Thursday.
Breaking that pesky losing streak stretching back four years remains Eau Claire’s first goal — and something Holloway, the team’s quarterback, said is going to result in a lot of tears (especially from him) as well as a celebratory Gatorade cooler bath for Simons.
But it’s far from the ultimate goal of sustained success at Eau Claire and the satisfaction and joy that would bring to the coaches. And the administration. And a community that Canada has seen support the football team “win, lose or draw.”
And the kids. Especially the kids.
“I told them to just throw away all the old stuff,” Simons said. “It’s a new day, new way. I don’t care what you did in your last three years. Everything’s a clean slate with me. Let’s try something and start building something now instead of waiting.”
He looked toward the field and smiled.
“These guys deserve it, man.”
This story was originally published August 24, 2023 at 7:00 AM.
