Not long long after his mother passed away, Winona Christian School football coach Junior Graham helped clean out her house.
He took with him a couple of boxes containing press clippings from Graham’s coaching days at Weir and Eupora.
“My mother, she kept everything,” Graham said. “After she died, we moved a lot of her stuff and I just hadn’t had the opportunity to go through it. When we started this quarantine, I just decided to start going through some of those things.”
Once Graham started going through those boxes, what he found was a lifetime of memories that he started sharing on social media.
“Once I started going through the boxes and started sharing the memories on social media, it just sort of branched out and took off,” Graham said. “I have talked to a number of past players, through Messenger on Facebook. It has been a good opportunity to reconnect with players that I haven’t seen since graduation. I have been at some very special places. Weir was a really special place and Eupora was a really special place. Winona Christian is similar to those other two schools.”
What Graham found through practicing social distancing was a small world of friends, fans and former students.
“I figured that people would get tired of it, but it was actually just the opposite,” Graham said. “It was actually a perfect storm. When I started posting those memories, a lot of people were at home and were looking for something other than posts about COVID-19. Then other coaches started to do it and it seemed like a snowball effect. I’m not saying I started it but I noticed a lot more coaches doing it after I started.”
Graham said he enjoyed the stroll down memory lane.
“It was fun to set back and remember big games and big losses and the big wins,” Graham said. “There is nothing wrong with living in the past for a short time as long as you don’t get hooked up in it. My past, football wise, has been really special with the players, coaches and cheerleaders. I’ve been really fortunate. I’ve had awesome fans at all of these places. I got a big response from the fans at Weir. And we saw our fan base really grow in our time at Eupora. Football was really important to those communities.”
Graham said not only has he heard from former players, but also from students as well.
“To be honest, the biggest surprise was from the number of non players that responded,” Graham said. “I hope when I’m gone from here, I hope people will say that I tried to treat students just like they were players. I have built a lot of relationships with people who were never players. That was the amazing thing was the students that responded. They didn’t play but they had so much pride in the school. It was just refreshing for them to sit back and remember Friday nights.”
Graham said he is basically through with his social media posts from his mother’s old press clippings but has one final project that he’s working on.
“I’ve reached out to some players and am trying to get them to find some action photos,” Graham said. “I’ve had numerous college players but I’ve had so many small players that were impact players. They are some of the most overlooked players to ever play the game because they aren’t recruitable kids. I have been more than blessed to have a large number of those guys. My last project is to try and honor some of those guys. They have a special place in my heart because so many good players never go play at the next level.”
