ON TOP FOR NOW: Trojans are owners of nation’s longest winning streak at 52 games

Published 8:29 pm Saturday, August 26, 2023

Separated by over 1,000 miles, the John Milledge Academy and Andale High School football teams will probably never stand across the field from one another.

So what thread is tying a Georgia private school together with a public school in south Kansas?

Winning. A lot of it.

So much so, in fact, that they are neck and neck for the nation’s longest active high school football winning streak. With its 58-12 defeat of Mississippi’s Canton Academy Saturday, John Milledge is, for now, the leader with 52 consecutive victories.

The Trojans (2-0 this season) under head coach JT Wall entered 2023 a game back of the Andale Indians, who are at 51 straight wins. The Indians have a chance to match – and likely will – when they play their season opener this Friday, Sept. 1 against Wellington (Trojans are off next week). If both JMA and Andale cap off their fifth-consecutive perfect campaigns with state championships, they will have each played 13 games this year, giving the lead back to Andale come season’s end, 64-63. The schools would be on the same track if not for that little thing known as the Covid-19 pandemic. John Milledge was met with two no contest cancellations in 2020 while Andale had just one. Those no contests did not count towards their records.

So what’s the familiarity level between the active streak leaders who can be mentioned in the same sentence despite half the country sitting between them? Well, if you know any football coaches, you know their focus is on the next opponent, not a school that’s multiple states away.

“Not at all. No clue,” Andale head coach Dylan Schmidt said when asked if he knew anything about JMA.

“I don’t know what they run offensively, defensively, or how big their school is,” said Wall when posed with the same question. “I really do not know anything about their program – other than they win a lot of football games.”

Andale (population 941 in the 2020 census) is located about 15 to 20 minutes outside of Wichita. Schmidt said families settle down there so they can live in a rural setting with a larger city still nearby. The high school’s enrollment sits around 375 students, placing it in the Kansas State High School Activities Association’s (KSHSAA) 3A classification. The remarkable thing is that Andale High this season is expected to roster 92 players, which is roughly double the size of an average 3A school in Kansas. That means if the school’s population is around 50-50 male-female, then just about every other male walking the hallways is suiting up for the Indians on Friday nights. Schmidt said a lot of things have helped create the program’s winning culture, including the community.

“The environment itself has been a big factor, and there’s been a lot of continuity on the coaching staff because people want to hang around when you’re successful. I could go on and on because there are so many different things,” the Andale head coach said, citing weight room performance as another contributor.

Private school John Milledge is of course much smaller with fewer than 200 students in its high school. Wall has in the past rostered as many as 62 players, although that was an outlier year. This year’s number is 35. No matter the numbers, there aren’t many, if any, teams of the Trojans’ size that can match their athleticism and work ethic. The backs of the team’s workout shirts have the words, “It ain’t for everybody,” printed on them, which tells you what you need to know about how hard Wall and his staff work the players in order to prepare for games under the lights.

“I think we learn more with each game and each year,” the JMA head coach said. “Hopefully we become better coaches and learn from our mistakes. We try to evolve. Looking back, I can’t really pinpoint one thing that sparked the fire. We’ve always tried to go week to week. The streak really and truly kind of snuck up on us, minus everybody else talking about it, because we really try to compartmentalize each game and each opponent. When we get past an opponent, we put them off to the side and think about the next one. You lose some of the flair of enjoying it, but at the same time you walk off the field thinking about the next one.”

Both coaches’ teams last lost a football game at the end of their 2018 seasons, Andale 21-19 against Pratt in the state semifinal and John Milledge 48-0 in the championship to Frederica. The losses were difficult to swallow in their own ways. Since then though, the Trojans and Indians have run through pretty much every opponent they have faced. Over the last four years, Schmidt’s Andale crew has cumulatively outscored teams 2,642-302. Putting that into more palatable figures, the Indians’ average result is around 52-6 with 51.8 points per game scored and 5.9 allowed in the 51-game streak. The Kansas school made national headlines last year, not just because of its winning streak, but because of a 108-0 win against Nickerson. Their closest call so far in the streak has been a 29-22 final against Cheney in 2019, but Andale would fire back to dominate the rematch later that year, 55-20.

Schmidt was asked if he and his players feel any pressure in carrying their streak.

“Yeah I think so, if I’m being honest,” he said. “It’s been a fun deal. You want to keep it going, but with all that said, I don’t know what changes. The process is the process. I don’t know if there’s any more intensity or less intensity. We’re not talking about it. Obviously we’re talking about being on time, giving your best effort, finishing blocks, and taking care of the football. I guess the only thing that does change is you know what you’re doing is working, so maybe there’s a little peace of mind and confidence there.”

With Saturday’s win over Canton, Wall’s Trojans during their streak have likewise demolished opposing teams 2,242-298. Their average final score is a bit more friendly at 44-6, but they boast plenty of 50-plus-point victories in the ongoing span. (JMA’s totals are divided by 51 instead of 52 because one of the wins in their streak was a forfeit) The closest game John Milledge has played during its run happened last year when it held off Tattnall Square Academy late to win 28-21 in Macon.

Wall was asked the same question about feeling any pressure amid the string of victories.

“Not particularly,” he said. “This group we’ve got right now, we told them before the first game that they were 0-0. There’s no pressure on them. We’ve got to worry about what we’ve got to worry about right now. We can’t get caught up in winning streaks.”

Wall’s philosophy going back to last year when his team was running down Buford High School for the longest winning streak in Georgia history was to play week-to-week and celebrate the milestones when the work was finished.

Looking at each school’s state, JMA already owns the record for longest winning streak in Georgia. The previous number was 47 until the Trojans defeated Heritage in the state playoffs last year. Andale, meanwhile, is still chasing its state’s mark of 79 wins set by Smith Center from 2004-09. Both programs have a long way to go in order to capture the national record set by California’s De La Salle. The Spartans went unbeaten for over a decade, winning 151 games from 1992 to 2004.

As for potential tripping up points, the four-time reigning Georgia Independent Athletic Association (GIAA) Class AAA champion Trojans tackled an unknown Saturday in dominating Mississippi’s private school league 3A champ from a year ago. Stratford and Tattnall, both teams that gave John Milledge tough opposition last season, await later in this year’s schedule. Stratford, Tattnall, and the other two Macon schools will move up to 4A come state playoff time. No GIAA 3A school has come anywhere close to the standard set by Wall’s program in recent years.

Schmidt pointed to Andale’s Oct. 6 date against rival Wichita Collegiate as a big matchup, though the Indians have taken each of the last seven meetings in that series including last year’s 49-0 final.

It would be hard to bet against either John Milledge or Andale with the information at hand, so the question remains: who blinks first in this staring contest between excellent high school football programs?