New Madrid Co. Central to play for district championship

NEW MADRID COUNTY, Mo. (KFVS) - The New Madrid County Central football team will play for a district championship on Friday night, November 12.

“There’s a lot of history here. There’s a lot of history here,” said Head Coach Tyler Fullhart. “Coming here, getting the community on board, it means the world to me.”

Since taking over in 2016, Fullhart has turned the Eagles program around.

“Trust the process and keep grinding, keep going, keep pushing,” he said. “I mean, that’s what we’ve done here, and just proud of how far we’ve come.”

Getting to this point came from studying some of the best in the area.

“My time at Jackson was definitely beneficial,” he said. “Working with Coach Eckley and falling in love with the process was really the big thing that stood out. Just trying to put them all together to do the best thing for these guys at New Madrid County.”

His culture is taking hold.

“It’s been awesome,” Jake Kimball said. “Coach Fullhart is an exceptional coach. He knows his x’s and o’s. He loves the kids. We’ve had our ups and our downs. He’s done a great job building the culture.”

“I can remember him coming over to the middle school game and practices and helping us out a little bit,” Ethan Moore said. “He’d bring the high school guys and looking up to them it was like, those are the guys that you see on Friday night play. He’d come over with them and you’d run drills with them and it’d make you feel really good.”

“They hard on us. It changed,” Corvel Williams said. “They hard on us and you can tell the school atmosphere is amazing. Exciting.”

But Fullhart’s message doesn’t end after the final whistle.

“I really enjoy the relationship building,” he said. “The time spent building relationships, understanding what their life is about, what do they enjoy? What do they like doing? And then teaching them how to be a better person. We try to get better every day. If we can do that, we’ll be alright.”

New Madrid County Central will play Lift for Life Academy at 7 p.m. on Friday in Class 2 of the Missouri District Finals.

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