Under Samsel, Olive Branch among area’s football elite

After conducting football practice one recent afternoon, after making sure all the footballs were in a bag and a birthday cake had been delivered to a player, Olive Branch coach Scott Samsel walked a visitor inside the school building to a mini-shrine of the program’s accomplishments.

There, on a blue wall, were assorted team photos dating back to the very first Conquistadors team in 1926. Samsel pointed out his grandfather on the top row of the sepia-toned 1932 photo. The program’s accomplishments were sprinkled throughout.

There is a pervasive feeling upon spending time at Olive Branch: The Conquistadors have always been good, sometimes really good, at football. But it wasn’t until last year that Samsel’s team made the leap that high school coaches across the Mid-South — across the country, really — stay up at night trying to figure out how to make: Olive Branch went from good to great. For the first time, the Conquistadors were the state champions.

As Samsel strolled around his facility Monday afternoon, his team was in the midst of a historic high: It had won 20 consecutive games, was the defending champion in Mississippi’s largest classification and was ranked No. 1 among Shelby-Metro teams. And earlier in the year, it was ranked among Rivals.com’s top 100 teams in the nation.

CLEARING THE HURDLE

The 50-year-old Samsel, whose deep-voiced drawl rarely yields to a laugh, is all business. He arrived at Olive Branch from Lafayette County in 2006, having once flirted with the job when his old coach, Leslie Pool, retired at the end of the 1998 season. He took over teams that had won 22 games in the two preceding seasons under Jamie Mitchell and took no time building on it. Samsel’s Conquistadors went 12-2 in his first season.

But much of the building took place outside of 7 o’clock on Friday night. Two of his former players built the equipment for a new weight room, something Samsel guessed was worth about $ 400,000. The grass was ripped up at the stadium, which is named after Pool, before the 2008 season and replaced with artificial turf at a cost of $900,000. His program has established pipelines to colleges. The team’s adidas uniforms are sleek and modern. Practices run on a timer, a shrill tone signaling the time to learn something new. “We try to structure our practice like a college practice,” he said. With a whopping 113 players, just from 10th through 12th grades, his roster looks like a college one, too.

Yet for every stride Olive Branch made in recent years toward becoming a super-program, there remained a couple of nemeses. Fifty miles down Interstate 55 in Batesville lives South Panola, a program whose elite-level success defies explanation. From 2003 to 2010, South Panola played for the state title every season. In all but 2008, it won it. And outside of Jackson, Madison Central nestled into a role as one of the state’s other top powers. Here’s how this mattered to Samsel and the Conquistadors: South Panola is in Olive Branch’s region, thus guaranteeing an annual matchup. And in Mississippi’s north-south split of postseason brackets, Olive Branch’s route to the title game had to run through South Panola or Madison Central.

For all of Samsel’s success, the Conquistadors could not clear those hurdles. Good, not great. Until last season: In a regular-season matchup, Olive Branch upended South Panola 24-6, breaking a streak of 14 consecutive losses to the Tigers. In the playoffs, with South Panola already ousted, the Conquistadors broke through in the semifinals with a 40-35 win over Madison Central. The next week, they edged Petal by a point to win a wild state title game and the 6A trophy, which rests on a shelf in Samsel’s office.

Samsel doesn’t like the idea that his team was only legitimate once it beat mighty South Panola and once it advanced to Jackson, but he understands that’s probably the perception.

“People only want to assign credibility to you when you’ve won the big game,” Samsel said.

Said Daivon Milan, a senior lineman: “Once we got past them, we felt like we can accomplish anything.”

‘US’ VS. ‘Y’ALL’

Olive Branch wins, therefore it has critics. Their gripe: players who transfer there. Last year, the program was placed on probation in the regular season by the Mississippi High School Activities Association in connection with four transfers from Melrose. The students said they didn’t move to Olive Branch to play football but to have a better academic situation.

Samsel bristles at the criticism. He’s quick to point out what he says are the positives of Olive Branch: a commitment to education, discipline and character, lessons he learned playing under Pool.

“It’s not just a football factory, contrary to what some people may believe,” Samsel said.

Kyle Brigance, a 1985 Olive Branch graduate and the school’s principal, puts the transfers in perspective. “The truth is, we’ve had Memphis kids moving down here for a long time. All of DeSoto County, for that matter.”

He offers some numbers to back up his point. His graduating class in 1985 had 125 students. The school was in a 4A classification for years. But at its peak during the DeSoto building boom, Olive Branch had around 2,000 students. A pair of other schools have been built recently to cut into Olive Branch’s zone, giving the school about 1,200 students — making it among the smaller schools in 6A.

In 1990, DeSoto County had some 68,000 residents. Twenty years later, it had over 160,000.

Yet a Friday night at Olive Branch retains a smalltown feel. Fans walked in from parking their cars on neighboring streets as the school’s lot closed an hour and fifteen minutes before kickoff. One of the end zone signs paid homage to both last year’s title and a Beyoncé song: “Put Another Ring On It.” The scoreboard is not inscribed with “HOME” and “AWAY,” instead opting for “US” and “Y’ALL.”

And Pool, namesake of the field, sits in a folding chair at an end zone close to the team’s entry and exit, soaking it all in.

“High school football in Olive Branch has always been a big deal,” Pool said. “This has always been a great football community, football school.”

‘CONSISTENCY’

Five thousand people visited Friday night to watch the annual grudge match with South Panola, but the home crowd left disappointed: The Tigers played brilliantly, stifling the offense that won Olive Branch a state title last year, and handed the Olive Branch High School students show up early, fill the stadium and stand and cheer for their Conquistadors. The attitude around the school is that the Quistors have been and always will be a football power. home team a 28-14 loss. Whether this means Olive Branch will go from great to good, or whether those two terms are ever truly indicative of a program week to week, well, that remains to be seen.

Samsel has no plans to leave, no designs to parlay success at Olive Branch into something else. Thousands will still file into Pool Field next week, Olive Branch will still play well into cold weather this fall and there’s a good chance that another crop of Conquistadors will sign college scholarships in February.

“It’s just one simple word,” said Brigance, the principal, when asked about Samsel’s success, “and it’s ‘consistency.’ ”