‘We’re competing against ourselves’: Douglass football may be without equal in town

How do you break a football team’s will? Within Lexington city limits, all it seems to take is showing up with “Douglass” across your chest.

Since it opened in the 2017-18 school year, Frederick Douglass High School has played 37 games against other schools in the city. The Broncos have won all 37 games.

Just two of those were against private schools: a 42-31 win at Lexington Catholic in 2019 and a 40-6 home win over Lexington Christian in 2020. The remainder were against others in the Fayette County Public Schools district. A 40-7 clobbering of Tates Creek on Friday night was Douglass’ 35th straight victory over an FCPS opponent.

Tates Creek (1-3) deserves ample props for showing up: it’s the only FCPS program other than Bryan Station that even agreed to play the Broncos each of the past two seasons and this one. (Bryan Station doesn’t get a choice; it shares a district with Douglass.) But the Commodores’ fate was no better in their ninth meeting than their last eight.

Douglass secured a running clock midway through the third quarter following a touchdown run by Jermiah Turner, his second of the night, and earned its first win of the 2025 season. The city’s bugaboo for the first time made it to mid-September without a victory, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, this was the year to get ’em.

But the Broncos, now at 1-3 with their smallest senior class in the program’s nine years, seem further ahead than ever.

“We’re not worried about the score; we were just trying to get better out here,” said Dakari Talbert, a junior who rushed for a game-high 111 yards and a TD. “We’re not really competing against them. We’re competing against ourselves. As long as we keep that mentality, we’re gonna be just fine.”

How Douglass started 1-3

“Ifs” don’t amount to much in one’s win-loss record, but if a couple of things had played out differently, Douglass could be 3-1.

A mistake-ridden performance against Highlands — 3-1 after suffering its first loss at Boyle County on Friday night — eventually gave way to a double-overtime defeat on the road. A tie game with Manual was halted due to weather last week. When it resumed Saturday afternoon, the Broncos were listless.

“I thought we played really well (last) Friday,” Douglass head coach Nathan McPeek said. “We came back for the restart on Saturday and you could tell that we were young, because we played terrible. Credit to Manual, we had all the advantages. They had to get on a bus and drive back to Louisville, come back and play at noon. They have a lot more older kids than we got, and they handled it well.”

Trinity, the two-time defending Class 6A champion, made short work of the Broncos in a 37-0 win in Louisville. It’ll be tough for Douglass, with its lack of seasoning, to make up enough ground to derail the Shamrocks’ well-oiled machine should they meet in the playoffs. But anyone eager to brush off Douglass as a meaningful challenger following its worst start in program history should take a seat.

Its record could look even worse by early October: Douglass travels to Class 4A contender Corbin (3-1 after a 35-28, to Pulaski County on Friday) and then has a bye week before visiting fellow Class 6A stalwart Male (2-1, off on Friday). Or perhaps the Broncos will have grown up enough to enter district play with a .500 record — an achievement, if it pans out that way.

“The little stuff matters,” said Rahzeon Gillispie, a junior offensive lineman. “The little stuff is why we lost our first game, but right now we’re back on the come-up.”

Building Douglass

Frederick Douglass’s stranglehold on Lexington football has survived two full presidential terms and a global pandemic. ChatGPT launched in 2022, though generating a way for anyone in town to dethrone the Broncos appears beyond its capabilities.

One need not spend much time around Lexington’s football scene to hear casual accusations of “recruiting,” yet in nine years no one’s stepped up to go on-record with credible evidence thereof. Changing attitudes surrounding the movement of interscholastic athletes between schools increasingly make conversations about “recruiting” somewhat trivial. And let’s not get started on the impact of laws regarding name, image and likeness.

“It goes along with success and winning,” said McPeek, who’s led the program since 2020. “I’m a very humble person, but I’ve been very successful in my career as a player and a coach. I know what it needs to look like to be good. As far as what other people say, I can’t control that.

“But if you were to really sit them down and ask them, truthfully, they know what kind of job we do. They may not admit it publicly, but behind closed doors, coaches and people would say, ‘They do a really good job.’”

The “newness” of Douglass was absolutely an advantage in 2017, when through the mechanics of opening a new school it did steal players from existing teams, some of whom had the option to stay put or join the fledgling program.

“I think people are a little upset with us because some of their better players are maybe coming over to play for us,” then-head coach Brian Landis told the Herald-Leader as part of a multi-part video series documenting the Broncos’ inaugural campaign.

But it isn’t new now. It won’t be long before an entire class of kindergarten students will have grown up with Frederick Douglass as a possible destination. In that time, older schools in Lexington have significantly improved their football facilities. A couple of them have gotten entire new classroom buildings or will soon have them.

No matter how it’s happened, Douglass has sustained a level of consistent success seldom seen in Lexington. It’s also the only FCPS program this century to have won a state football championship, a feat it achieved in 2022. In six years, the Broncos did something only three other FCPS schools — Bryan Station (1971), Henry Clay (1981) and Tates Creek (1972) — have done in their decades-long histories.

Bryan Station, which also notched its first win of the season Friday (8-3 at Ballard) after an 0-3 start against a hefty schedule, hosts Douglass on Oct. 17. That’s the only remaining guaranteed meeting between the Broncos and another Lexington school this season.

Immediately after the quote above, Landis said something else: “We’re gonna get everybody’s best, and if we’re not ready to go, it can be a long, long year.”

Douglass, the new kid on the block, went 7-0 against FCPS teams that season. The average score was 33-11.

In the 28 games since, the average score was the same as Friday’s: 40-7.

This story was originally published September 13, 2025 at 8:06 AM.