Sammie Coates’ second season at Columbia High School opened with something the program had been chasing for years: a win.
The former Auburn receiver led the Eagles to a 41-14 rout of Greensboro on Saturday night, snapping a 101-game losing streak and giving Columbia its first victory since 2015. For a team that went 0-10 in 2025 and had just 28 student-athletes spread across 22 offensive and defensive positions, plus special teams, the turnaround started with something as basic as getting more bodies in the building.
Coates said in the preseason that simply getting to a full roster of 60 players could make a major difference. After Saturday’s result, it looked like he was right.
“They seen the culture change, they seen the shift and what we was trying to build, they came out. That was huge.
That was my biggest problem last year. Numbers.
They buying in because we show we really care about them,” Coates said.
The win also backed up the work Columbia has been doing behind the scenes. Before his first season, Coates said Gatorade was helping the program develop talent with support from Gatorade Sports Science Institute experts through personalized sweat testing and education.
"Gatorade isn’t just fueling our team - they’re helping us re-write the script,” Coates said last August. “With their support, our guys are training smarter, performing more efficiently and learning what it takes to be great on and off the field."
Saturday night showed that progress in a big way. Columbia hadn’t scored 40 points in a game since a 49-40 loss to Ardmore on September 25, 2020. The defensive end of the performance was just as striking, marking the Eagles’ most dominant showing since 2013, the last time they allowed fewer than 15 points.
Coates has already taken a remarkable route to this point. He was Auburn’s top receiver during the 2013 season that nearly ended with a national championship, and his path since then has carried him from Leroy, Alabama, to the NFL for five years and into coaching stops in Florida, Ohio and Virginia before landing at Columbia.
Now he’s turned a program that had become a regular punching bag in Huntsville into something worth watching in AHSAA Class 5A.
That kind of start changes the conversation fast. Coates’ coaching profile is already rising, and if Columbia keeps moving like this, the next step could come even sooner than expected.
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