By CURTIS ROCKWELL/Sports Director

A pair of squads in the “Southern Six” enter the upcoming football season in possession of losing streaks in the double digits.
While no team in South Mississippi finished unbeaten last year, both St. Martin and Pearl River Central suffered through winless campaigns as the Yellow Jackets went 0-10 and the Blue Devils went 0-9.
It marked the first winless season for St. Martin since 2010, and the Yellow Jackets enter the current campaign saddled with a 17 game losing streak.
However, it’s not the longest losing streak in the history of the SMHS program. In fact, it’s not even close to the longest in the three decades.
St. Martin suffered through a stretch of 31 games that spanned from the third week of the 1997 season until the end of the 1999 campaign.

Oddly enough, that historic streak ended with a 50-35 win over Pearl River Central to open the 2000 season.
And speaking of PRC, the Blue Devils enter the 2024 season on a 13 game losing streak after the winless season last year. The Blue Devils also struggled the year before, finishing up at 1-9, and PRC has lost 18 out of its past 19 games as well as 21 out of its last 23 contests.
St. Martin hosts Vancleave in an all Jackson County showdown to open the season Friday night while PRC travels to South Pike. Both teams can take heart a bit, though, and strive to achieve what Long Beach did last season.
The Bearcats snapped a statewide longest 29 game on field losing streak last year with a 34-20 win over visiting Purvis in week four last year. The unsuccessful stretch was officially 32 games, which would have tied the longest losing streak in the “Southern Six” in the last 30 years, thanks to a trio of Covid forfeits by Long Beach in 2020.

Long Beach went on to pick up another win just two weeks later, nipping South Jones 35-34, and the Bearcats finished the season at 2-9 for their most wins in a season since 2018.
That number of 32 is the longest on-field losing streak for any squad in the “Southern Six” over the past three decades and that dubious distinction belongs to the Hancock Hawks, who dropped 32 straight games in a span that started in mid-October of 2004 and ended in the opening game of the 2008 season.