High school football will return to Mobile’s Ladd-Peebles Stadium for the 2022 season.
New Stadium general manager CJ Drinkard told AL.com’s The Led this week that the first game would be Thursday, Aug. 25. The teams haven’t been announced.
“We will have that contract solidified within the next couple of days,” Drinkard said Tuesday afternoon. “But I can assure you that they will play games here. So right now, we’re just making sure that the details are what the details need to be. But they will play games here, with the first one being the 25th, which is next Thursday.”
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Mobile County Public School officials have not announced the full schedule for their high schools this season. Only the locations of this week’s opening games have officially been announced. None of those will be played at Ladd.
The Mobile County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to meet Thursday morning.
“There’ll be between 10 to 15 games here,” Drinkard said. “So, we’ll have a steady flow of games throughout the season. And, you know, as far as next year is concerned, we’ll visit next year towards the end of the season. But my hopes are that we bring back those schools like Murphy and Williamson, who pretty much won’t have a field of their own next year.”
MCPSS officials announced last October that their teams would no longer play at Ladd following a shooting in the Stadium’s concourse during the final minutes of an Oct. 15, 2021, game between Vigor and Williamson. It was the second shooting in three years during an MCPSS game at Ladd. In 2019, nine people were injured by gunfire at a LeFlore-Williamson game.
Those shootings led MCPSS to move the remainder of the 2021 games to other sites and look for options in the future. The largest school system in the state later announced it would build on-campus stadiums at LeFlore, Davidson, Williamson BC Rain and Vigor.
However, those stadiums are not ready for the 2022 season. Also, Murphy, which has long played home games at Ladd, is landlocked and doesn’t have a home stadium nor a plan for any future stadium at this point, although officials and Board members have long said they are looking at options for the Panthers .
Six MCPSS high schools — Mary G. Montgomery, Baker, Alma Bryant, Theodore, Blount and Citronelle — already have on-campus stadiums.
The current plan, according to Mobile coaches, is for Davidson to play home games at Baker (as it did last year), BC Rain to play home games at Alma Bryant and Vigor to play games at Blount.
That would leave Murphy, Williamson and likely LeFlore looking for home fields. LeFlore’s stadium is the closest to being finished but won’t be in time for next week’s home opener against rival Williamson.
Citronelle already announced on social media that its Oct. 6 game against Williamson would be played at Ladd.
Leadership at Ladd has changed since last fall with Drinkard, a former CFL and Tuskegee quarterback, taking over as the venue’s general manager after longtime manager Vic Knight died in May.
Drinkard did not return follow-up calls, texts or emails from AL.com Tuesday.