For a few days every summer, I trade my sports editor’s fedora — complete with the little “news” or “press” ticket tucked into the band — for the cowboy hat of a bounty hunter.

I ride up and down the dusty internet wastelands looking for names and information. Some leads pan out. Others lead down curious rabbit holes to nowhere. Still others just pull me back to scrolling Facebook or Twitter for a few minutes.

My quarry is football players. Vicksburg-area players. It’s a long, grueling task that’s often a lot more boring than fun, which is why I felt the need for a bit of melodrama in describing it. Gotta make clicking a mouse and keyboard sound exciting somehow, right?

As I mention every year about this time, one of my tasks before each football season is compiling a full list of every college football player I can find from the Vicksburg area. It’s not nearly as simple as it sounds.

The process involves scrolling through more than 200 rosters from schools — of all levels, from junior college to NAIA, to Division III, Division II, the FCS and the FBS — in a dozen states. Some we’re well aware of. Others, especially now in the era of the transfer portal, are needles in needlestacks, stacked inside of a haystack. There isn’t an easy way to find them with Google or another search engine, so it’s back to click-point-scroll-repeat.

Along the way I’ll come across other notable players, or ones who seem to have gotten lost. There are are players who took junior college detours, transferred once or twice, and are nowhere near the school they intended to spend four years with on signing day. Those are the ones we hunt down and track by scanning the roster of places like Bluefield University and Oklahoma Panhandle State.

Fortunately, this is the kind of work that has an odd appeal for me. It’s a bit of detective work, which is kind of what all reporting is on some level. Piecing together clues and facts to unearth a stray name is strangely satisfying.

This year’s hunt rounded up nearly three dozen players from Vicksburg and surrounding towns like Port Gibson, Rolling Fork and Raymond who are currently at four-year schools and Mississippi’s junior colleges. We’ll track their exploits with our weekly “How They Did” feature.

And if you’ve got any tips on anybody we missed, email us at sports@vicksburgpost.com. I’ll be happy to put the cowboy hat back on and hit the dusty trail one more time.

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Ernest Bowker is the sports editor of The Vicksburg Post

Vicksburg’s college football players
A list of college football players from Vicksburg-area high schools:

Southern Miss
• Caleb Bryant, DL, Fr. (Vicksburg)
• Damion Miller, DB, Fr. (Port Gibson)
• Jordan Johnson, DB, Jr. (South Delta)

Alcorn State
• JD Kelly, DB, Fr. (Vicksburg High)

Mississippi Valley State
• Malik Montgomery, RB, Fr. (Vicksburg)

Delta State
• Carter Coullard, TE, So. (Briarfield Academy)

Mississippi College
• Jaylin Thompson, DB, Sr. (Warren Central)

Belhaven
• Brayden Bullock, Fr. (Central Hinds)
• Breck Farrior, OL, So. (Central Hinds)
• Nobile Germany, Fr. (Central Hinds)
• Nash Lauderdale, WR, Fr. (Central Hinds)

Southern University
• Joshua Griffin, K, Sr. (Warren Central)

Northwestern State
• Stevie Ballard, OL. Sr. (Central Hinds)

Nicholls State
• Laurence Sullivan, CB, Jr. (Vicksburg High)

West Alabama
• Lamar Gray, LB, Sr. (Warren Central)
• Mason Watts, OL, So. (St. Aloysius)

South Alabama
• Reed Buys, OL, Sr. (Warren Central)
• Tyler Carter, DE, Fr. (Vicksburg)
• Julien Demby, LB, Fr. (Warren Central)

Troy
• T.J. Thompson, LB, Jr. (Warren Central)

Miles College
• Kellen Washington, DE, Fr. (Vicksburg High)

Georgia State
• Jeremiah Johnson, S, Sr. (South Delta)

Bluefield University
• Jehari Riley, OL, Sr. (Vicksburg High)

Alabama State
• Brandon Gilliam, K, Jr. (Warren Central)
———
Mississippi junior college players
Hinds
• Jerald Woods, OL, So. (Warren Central
• Kearris Gilliam, DB. So. (Vicksburg High)
• Koury Vample, DB, Fr. (Vicksburg High)
• Emmanuel Sutton, DL, Fr. (South Delta)

Mississippi Gulf Coast
• Trey Hall, RB, So. (Warren Central)
• Zack Evans, WR, Fr. (Warren Central)
• Tyler Henderson, WR, Fr. (Vicksburg High)

East Mississippi
• Shar’Dez Taylor, OL, So. (Vicksburg High)

Northwest Mississippi
• Jack Wright, QB, Fr. (Warren Central)

Coahoma
• Logan Myles, LB, So. (Warren Central)

Copiah-Lincoln
• Rakeem Davis, DL, Fr. (Port Gibson)

East Central
• Demarcus Jones, DL, So. (Warren Central)
———
Professional football
• Nick Anderson, LB, Edmonton Elks/CFL (Vicksburg High)

• Ben Brown, OL, Las Vegas Raiders/NFL (St. Aloysius)

About Ernest Bowker

Ernest Bowker is The Vicksburg Post’s sports editor. He has been a member of The Vicksburg Post’s sports staff since 1998, making him one of the longest-tenured reporters in the paper’s 140-year history. The New Jersey native is a graduate of LSU. In his career, he has won more than 50 awards from the Mississippi Press Association and Associated Press for his coverage of local sports in Vicksburg.

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