Players say Bristol collegiate club football team can work

BRISTOL, Tenn.

Caleb Hunt misses the camaraderie, he says, taking a break from his solitary assignment of kicking footballs off a tee.

Then it’s back to work.

Taking nine steps back from the ball, he turns his body and counts out five more to his right. Then, with the rest of the Bristol Spartans running routes and dishing out handoffs, his trot toward the tee turns into a gallop and the 2007 graduate of Virginia High deftly places the sweet spot of his foot onto the ball.

It sails through the chilly October air, end over end, before plopping to the grass 40 or so yards away.

Picking up another ball, he lets out a sigh.

Giving up football after high school, he says, was not easy.

"It’s tough to give up," he says, never looking away from the ball he now holds in his hand. "The brotherly thing. Everybody working together for that one goal."

Hunt won a few games for the Bearcats his senior year thanks to his foot so, when he heard about the collegiate-level club team King College student Corey Miles was starting, he was definitely interested.

"I kind of waited around to see what was going to get together," he says. "I told [Miles] if it was serious, I’d definitely come out and kick."

Ask Miles, who played for the George Mason University club team before transferring to King, and he’ll tell you it’s very serious.

He’s spent hours putting together a game plan that doesn’t involve a single cut or curl. He got the T-shirts (replete with a quote from the movie "300" a Hollywood-ized glamorization of the legendary battle of Thermopylae slapped across the back in white letters), and he set the ground rules.

To play for the Spartans, you have to attend one of six area colleges – King, Virginia Intermont, ETSU, Northeast State, Virginia Highlands and Milligan – and hold a 2.3 grade-point average during the season.

Right now though, passersby won’t mistake the maroon-T-shirt clad Spartans for a full-contact football team during practice. Their pads won’t come in until December ("I can’t wait to start hitting," says former Virginia High quarterback Adam Sullins, who attends Virginia Highlands) and it won’t be until next fall when the Spartans take to the field in Southern Collegiate Football Club Association play against the likes of Clemson and Radford.

But that doesn’t stop the excitement from brewing inside Miles and Sullins or getting back to that sense of football family that Hunt, now a student at ETSU, longs for again.

"It’s sad," Hunt says, thinking back to his last high school game. "It’s horrible. It’s like, where do you go from here?"

Where the Spartans hope to go might not be easy. Right now Sullins, who will be at the helm of the Spartans offense, doesn’t have much of an offensive line. And Miles, though optimistic about the team’s future, isn’t quite sure what to expect when fall of 2010 rolls around and the team takes to the field for its first game.

"We hope to get a good fan base," he says. "But that’s on us."

Sullins concurs.

"If this thing gets going like we want it to get going with how much work we put into it and we go out and show people we are good athletes, which I think we are," he says. "Then people will talk and people will show up to watch football."

People in this area, he says, love football.

"And we got to put in the work, time and effort so people will show up to watch us and support us," he says.

Back at the field, Miles brings the team together into a small huddle where they thrust their hands into the air and let out a Spartan chant.

Again, the offense breaks off into a small group and Hunt walks by himself back over to the tee.

"You know," he says, picking a ball up off the grass, "I think it will work out."