Why is a Central Kentucky high school playing a football game in California?

If you’re itching to watch the Woodford County football team play this weekend and haven’t taken care of your accommodations, be ready to pony up.

Entry to the game will probably cost you only $10 at the gate, but you’ll need at least $500 for the plane ticket out of Bluegrass Airport to make it there reasonably early — or have the wakefulness of an elephant to power through the 32-hour drive to get there, probably right before kickoff.

A swarm of Yellow Jackets (3-0) was scheduled to land Wednesday afternoon in California, where they’ll face off against Warren High School (0-3) on Friday. It’s a return game; Woodford County won a nailbiter over the Bears, 40-39, last year in Versailles.

The unorthodox two-game series came together just as oddly. University of Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava played at Warren, and his brother Madden was the Bears’ quarterback last year. The team planned a trip to Knoxville last season, but a series of events led to that game falling through late and left a hole in its schedule. A mutual friend of Woodford County’s coach and former Warren head coach Kevin Pearson connected the two. Originally, the idea was Woodford would travel to play them in Knoxville — at one time there were plans to play at Neyland Stadium — but that also proved difficult to figure out, logistically.

“So I said, ‘Hey, Coach, you guys come to Woodford County, we’ll get you a tour of UK, take you to the horse farms, and we’ll return the favor next year,”’ said Dennis Johnson, Woodford County’s football coach and athletic director. “He said, ‘Would you do that?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’

“Coach Pearson was like, ‘A lot of our kids have never seen horses.’ … WinStar Farm was the crowning moment of their trip up here.”

‘You gotta know a few people’

Woodford County hooked up its far-from-home visitors, and since then Johnson has set things up nicely for his own contingent. The big-ticket items — plane tickets, hotel rooms at the local Embassy Suites and “about 75 percent” of the food — won’t cost players and their families anything. Johnson spearheaded fundraising efforts for the trip — estimated at a total value of more than $150,000 — and said a lot of it came about through goodwill.

“You gotta know a few people,” Johnson said with a laugh. “People have taken care of us. A lot of it’s fallen in my lap, to be totally honest. …

“When I do something, I’m gonna do it right or I’m not gonna do it. I’m not big on high school kids paying a lot of money, because parents don’t have it. People are trying to live, groceries are expensive. On every team, no matter what school you’re at, you’ve got different socioeconomic levels, so I try to be very conscious of that. ”

About 55 players, 20 cheerleaders and 25 coaches and school administrators are traveling officially, but an additional 70 family and friends have planned to follow them west. Several of Johnson’s friends around the country have planned to fly in to California, too, to support the Yellow Jackets. “We’ll have a decent crowd,” he said.

Warren is located in Downey, California, which is about 15 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Downey’s population alone is more than 114,000, dwarfing every Kentucky city except Louisville and Lexington. Nearly 10 million people inhabit Los Angeles County.

“They’ll love the weather, but I keep telling ’em, ‘Wait until you get out in that L.A. traffic,’” Johnson said with a laugh. “A 10-minute drive turns into 45 minutes, and an hour drive turns into three on a bus. They’re gonna get some culture shock.”

Building Woodford County

Woodford County was scheduled to visit UCLA’s football practice on Thursday and will attend the Bruins’ Big Ten debut against Indiana on Saturday. Johnson’s son Jasper, who recently committed to play basketball at UK, is friends with Louisville native D’Angelo Russell, who’s helped set up a tour of the Los Angeles Lakers’ facilities on Sunday. Later that same day, the team plans to visit the headquarters of Creative Artists Agency.

The fortuitous trip has been a powerful motivator for Johnson, whose long-term vision for Woodford County upon his hire was grand. Among his goals were to have the Yellow Jackets playing in state championship games forged by a schedule full of the best teams — locally and across the country. He’s already working on playing a game next year in Georgia.

“I think it’s time,” Johnson said. “We built our indoor facility with the help of our superintendent Danny Adkins and our Quarterback Club. We’re moving to a new school in January. It’s all great for the Woodford County brand. I think it’s important for our kids to be seen as many places as possible. To see what it takes to compete against the best, and what it really takes to play at the next level. Getting on planes, different time zones, all that.”

Warren fielded several Division I commits — including Madden, a UCLA commit who transferred to Long Beach Poly following the Bears’ first game of the season — in last year’s game, and boasts plenty of talent this year despite Madden’s departure. Woodford County ultimately wasn’t able to parlay a marquee victory into playoff success — it was the second of five straight wins before they dropped three of their last four — but it was a proof of concept for what the program is capable of doing on the field every week.

Beyond all of the events planned around this year’s game, and the game itself, simply being in California will be an unforgettable experience for the dozens of young people making the trip. For many, it’s their first time stepping foot on a plane.

“From an education perspective, we’ll get to see a part of the country that a lot of these kids have probably never seen,” Johnson said. “For those kids who have aspirations and want to leave the state to play football, or just leave the state when they get out of high school, this is an opportunity to see different stuff.

“We’ll have a good time. And we’ll have an even better time if we win the game.”

This story was originally published September 11, 2024 at 4:39 PM.