- September 16, 2024
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Thursday night lights at Matanzas High School during football season usually mean a JV game is going on. But on Thursday, Aug. 29, the players on the field were middle school students.
A team representing the First Baptist Christian Academy Crusaders of Palm Coast, but including players from four Flagler Count schools, has joined the St. Johns County Middle School Athletic Association football league.
The Crusaders played their first game on Aug. 29 against Landrum Middle School of Ponte Vedra Beach. Landrum won the game 7-0.
“We took one on the chin,” Crusaders head coach Dell Arneaud said. “We saw some positives. We’ll work on the negatives.”
The Crusaders were scheduled to be home again Thursday, Sept. 5, against Pacetti Bay of St. Augustine. But that game was moved to Pacetti Bay when Matanzas moved its varsity game to Thursday. Instead, the Crusaders will return home in two weeks.
Arneaud, whose children attend FBCA, has coached a Flagler Titans Pop Warner team the past couple of years, and he had helped coach First Baptist Christian middle school and varsity teams when FBCA played eight-man football.
“We’ve been trying to start an 11-man team for a couple of years. We know we don’t have a lot of high school kids, so our plan was to start with a middle school team. We found out about the league in St. Johns and they welcomed us,” he said.
Most of the players on the team are students at Buddy Taylor and Indian Trails middle schools with the rest from FBCA and Imagine School at Town Center. Many of the players played for Arneaud with the Titans.
“Coach Dell has a lot of good connections in the community,” FBCA athletic director Caleb Young said. “So he was trying to find some good character people to represent us.”
The team fills a gap in the football community.
“Middle School football is a direct replica of high school football,” said Matanzas head coach Matt Forrest, who watched the Crusaders’ first game. “It’s good to have a middle school team representing our town.”
Forrest said that unlike Pop Warner, there are no weight limits for middle school players. The games are at night, like high school games, and the players travel together on a bus to road games.
The players’ jerseys say Crusaders across the front and have their last names on the back, but Arneaud calls it a community team.
“This is preparation for high school football here,” Arneaud said. “Pop Warner was great. It served its purpose, but middle school football is what I'm used to being from Jacksonville. The majority of the team are eighth graders so they'll be playing at one of these two high schools in a year.”
Young said the team is basically a club team which FBCA is sponsoring. He’d like to see it grow and become more representative of First Baptist Christian Academy.
“We thought, let's try to put together a team. Our enrollment and interest for tackle football isn't that big yet. So we wanted to put out a product to say, hey we're serious about it, and then hopefully get more of our academy kids out there representing us,” he said.
This story was updated on Sept. 5.
