Harris County flag football team wins first state championship in program history

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Harris County flag football team wins first state championship in program history.

Credit: Courtesy of The Ledger-Enquirer

The Harris County High School flag football team has won the program’s first state championship.

The Tigers dominated Washington County 32-0 Monday in the Georgia High School Association Division 1 title game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.

HCHS improved its record to 24-3, capping a commanding playoff run. In their previous playoff games, the Tigers won 27-0, 26-0, 34-0 and 14-7.

Senior quarterback Madalynn Cauley led HCHS by completing 15-of-22 passes and being part of all five of the team’s touchdowns, passing or running.

Cauley first scored a rushing touchdown for a 6-0 lead on the team’s first possession, capping off a 64-yard drive. That was followed up with a scramble and a 40-yard touchdown pass to senior Pearson Pettit on the team’s second possession to make it 12-0.

Cauley converted a fourth-down run from the 4-yard-line for another touchdown and an 18-0 lead on the Tigers’ third possession. Cauley then completed a 4-yard touchdown pass to junior Aubry Mertz, and junior Macy Maguire scored the point-after attempt, for a 25-0 lead at halftime.

Pettit made an impact on both sides of the ball, grabbing an interception on Washington County’s first possession of the third quarter.

The offense followed that up with one more touchdown, as Mertz scored again on a pass from Cauley, and sophomore Hannah Huff caught the point-after attempt, for a 32-0 lead.

“These ladies are special,” first-year Harris County flag football head coach Michael Kinsey said in his interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting during the postgame celebration on the field. “I can’t think of a more deserving group than these young ladies, what they’ve endured, what they’ve gone through, how they’ve battled through adversity.

“They’re just, they’re so special. … I’m honored to have had an opportunity to be a part of their lives and coach them. … These girls are just something. They’re next level, man. They’re elite.”

Cauley was a freshman on the HCHS team that lost 13-0 to Southeast Bulloch in the 2022 GHSA Class A-4A state championship game. Then she was one of the Tigers who lost in the Elite Eight the next two seasons.

“We’ve always had a good team,” Cauley told GPB. “But this year, we finally had the missing piece: just a good coach that believes in us and follows through, and I feel like that’s what really changed it.”

This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.