Armuchee's first-ever football team holds 40-year reunion

ROME, Ga. - They practiced on gravel, played every game on the road and were plagued with injuries. That was just the good part.<br> <br> The 1962 Armuchee football team was a thrown-together group that didn&#39;t win a single game, but people don&#39;t remember that. They remember them as pioneers.<br> <br> &#34;We were the only school in the county without a football team, so it was kind of a consensus among the people in the community that we finally get one,&#34; said Hugh Selman, coach of the 1962 Armuchee Indians, the first team in school history. &#34;It was quite an experience.&#34;<br> <br> Selman, now 73, coached the Indians during their inaugural season before turning the reins over to Charlie Weatherford the following year. On Friday, Selman will take his inaugural team back onto the field for the first time in 40 years when they are honored at Armuchee&#39;s game against visiting Calhoun.<br> <br> &#34;It was kind of like looking down a gun barrel, I guess,&#34; Selman said of that first season. &#34;We just took the one&#39;s we had and went from there. It was a real task.&#34;<br> <br> Selman and his staff had 22 players on the roster, many of whom had never stepped foot onto a football field, and those first Indians lost their first game to a team that had been riding a 20-game losing streak.<br> <br> Not exactly &#34;Remember the Titans.&#34;<br> <br> &#34;I think I earned $700 that year,&#34; Selman said. &#34;But we got started and had a couple guys off the team go play college.&#34;<br> <br> Mike Miller and Terry Presley went on to play college football and another player from the team is Floyd County&#39;s Sheriff Tommy Rickman.<br> <br> &#34;We had some good times,&#34; Rickman said. &#34;Everybody was just raring to go and we had plenty of players; we just didn&#39;t have a lot of experience.&#34;<br> <br> Rickman remembers practicing on clay and gravel fields and getting hammered in the first game of that season against Cassville.<br> <br> &#34;They handed me the ball twice in a row, and I told them to give it to somebody else,&#34; he joked. &#34;It was like hitting a brick wall.&#34;<br> <br> Selman lost touch with some of those players over the years and a couple of them have died, including Troy Boyd, who died last Saturday, exactly 40 years after the final game of that inaugural season. Another player, Robert McClinton, died several years ago and there are others Selman hasn&#39;t heard anything about in 40 years, he said, but he hopes all the surviving players will be at the game Friday.<br> <br>