By CURTIS ROCKWELL/Sports Director

Prep football practice officially starts for Mississippi High School Activities Association sanctioned schools all across the state of Mississippi on Monday.
And that includes all 24 squads in the “Southern Six”.
Yes, from the largest to the smallest all teams and players with their sights set on bringing home a gold football in December will hit the practice field this week to begin pre-season camp.
“We’re excited to get going,” Resurrection head coach Eric Denmark, who enters his 32nd season as a football coach in Jackson County, said Sunday afternoon. “We put in a lot of hard work this summer, and we had a really good summer. I’m excited to see what type of product comes out for the first game. We just wanna take one day at a time and get better and work on the things that we need to work on.”
Once again this season, just like last year, Denmark will guide his Class 1A Eagles up against larger competition when RCS travels to McCulloch Stadium in Bay St. Louis to take on the Class 4A Bay High Tigers on Friday, Aug. 30th.

And speaking of much larger competition, on the complete other end of the spectrum from RCS is Class 7A Ocean Springs which enters year two of the Jake Bramlett era on Monday.
The Greyhounds went 9-1 overall last season and captured their fourth straight region title but were upset by Meridian at home in the opening round of the Class 7A South State playoffs.
“We’ve had to live with that feeling all off season,” Bramlett said, in a recent interview. “We had a great season but things just didn’t go our way in the playoffs. We’ve been focused all summer on game one against Madison Central. Getting started is something that we have looked forward to every day around here. We talk about what happened last year, moving forward and how we are going to fix those things this year, and be prepared for August 30th. Having that mindset all the way through the summer carries us to that day.”
The Greyhounds and Jaguars also opened up the season against one another last year, and homestanding Madison Central snapped a 20 game regular season Ocean Springs win streak in exciting fashion with a 15-14 decision.

Although Resurrection and RCS are just about as far apart as two teams can get classification-wise, both squads are facing similar situations in replacing starting quarterbacks.
The Greyhounds are turning to a two-pronged attack behind center with senior Conner White (a Moss Point transfer) and junior Sharroid Whitehead vying for playing time. Meanwhile, the Eagles are turning to an eighth-grader to call the signals in Cortez King.