By CURTIS ROCKWELL/Sports Director

MERIDIAN — Ocean Springs gets a head start on the kick off to the 20025 prep football season this week.

The Greyhounds head to historic Ray Stadium in Meridian Thursday night to tangle with the once mighty Wildcats. Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. Ocean Springs finished just 8-5 last season, but rallied from a 1-4 start in pre-region play to reel off seven straight wins at one point before falling to visiting Brandon in the Class 7A South State championship game.

Meanwhile, Meridian stumbled to a 4-7 mark last year in its first-year under new head coach Shelton Gandy and missed the playoffs.

“Meridian is going to be a tough opponent as always, especially playing at Ray Stadium,” OSHS head coach Jake Bramlett said Monday. “Historically, that is a very tough place to go in and come out with the win.”

The match-up is an historic outing for both teams, as it will mark the first time ever that the Greyhounds and Wildcats have ever met in the regular season.

Ocean Springs and Meridian have met four times overall, but all four of those meetings came in the state playoffs. And, the Wildcats have won all four of the previous games, including a stunning upset in Greyhound Stadium to open the Class 7A South State playoffs two years ago.

That contest also marks the only time the two teams met in Ocean Springs. The all-time series goes back just 19 years, to a 42-14 Wildcats win in 2006. The other two match-ups were blowouts by Meridian at home also, 50-14 the next season and 22-0 in 2010.

“It’s exciting to open the season at home, so we’re looking forward to the challenge against a really good team,” Gandy told The Meridian Star recently. “Expectations will be to play hard and be in the moment. Let the outcome take care of itself and not worry about what the score is.”

The contest came to fruition over the off-season, when Gandy and MHS Athletics Director Cheyenne Trusell contacted Bramlett about a possible game.

“Coach Gandy and coach Trussell reached out to me in December wanting to schedule a Thursday night match-up to kick off the season,” Bramlett explained. “They have been doing a lot to revive the facilities and program at Meridian and wanted to start the season with a big game. We love playing teams out of region three in our non-region to prepare us for the playoffs, and I hope we can make this game a staple in the future.”

Meridian was a long-time perennial power house in Mississippi back during the old Big Eight Conference days then carried that over by winning three state championships in the first two-decades plus after a statewide playoff system was implemented in 1981.

But the last state title for the Wildcats came in 2008, and MHS hasn’t won a region title since 2011. Meridian is also looking for its first winning regular season in nine years, since 2016.

This season, Meridian will look to veteran quarterback Corey McCann to lead the offense, as well as running backs Grant Hill and Jabari Foster.

“Offensively, we got to be balanced and not turn the ball over,” Gandy said. “Defense is going to have to tackle well in space and limit their explosive plays, and we need to win in the kicking game.”

Defensively, Jayden Johnson returns to patrol the secondary for the Wildcats, and OSHS is very familiar with him.

Despite recent records, Bramlett has seen firsthand how dangerous Meridian can be on any given night. The Wildcats finished the 2023 regular season at just 5-6, but waltzed into Greyhound Stadium as a fourth seed out of Region3-7A and slapped OSHS around to the tune of 35-23.

“They are returning a three-year starter quarterback that is obviously very experienced, and they are explosive defensively,” Bramlett concluded. “Johnson had a couple of interceptions against us two years ago as a sophomore. It will be a great test to see where we are coming into the 2025 season. We expect a lot out of our experienced defense and senior-heavy offensive line to guide us through the early part of our schedule.”