Delvan Irwin did not intend to become one of the leading historians on Mississippi high school football. Ten years and 14 books later, it just sort of happened.<\/p>\n
Irwin, a Vicksburg native and St. Aloysius graduate, has spent the past decade chronicling the history of more than a dozen of Mississippi\u2019s high school teams. His latest, \u201cEleven Brothers,\u201d covers Warren Central from 1965 through 2009 and will be released Nov. 29.<\/p>\n
Irwin\u2019s other books include histories of St. Aloysius, Cathedral, Pearl, Brandon, Magee, Louisville and Mississippi College. Two others on Jackson Prep and Hattiesburg will follow the one on Warren Central later this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a hobby is what it is. People like to hunt and fish, some people play golf every day. I love this,\u201d said Irwin, who works in the banking industry and lives in Clinton. \u201cI did St. Al. Then I wanted to do Natchez Cathedral because that was our big rival. Then my son was playing at Clinton, so I did Clinton. The next thing you know, it\u2019s taking off.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEleven Brothers\u201d follows the template Irwin laid down with his first book \u201cThe Brothers\u2019 Boys\u201d which details the history of his alma mater St. Aloysius. It is a 280-page encyclopedia of Warren Central football that includes a game-by-game recap for each of the program\u2019s first 45 seasons; a historical roster of more than 1,400 players, head coaches, assistant coaches and cheerleaders; all-county and all-district players and championships; and even a list of homecoming queens.<\/p>\n
Irwin assembled the information through painstaking research that pored over newspaper accounts from around the state, school yearbooks and other sources. He credited longtime Warren Central coach Curtis Brewer and Stacey Willoughby with providing some of the materials.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a puzzle. You\u2019ll build it. And then if you know you\u2019re missing something you go to the yearbooks and see if there\u2019s a name mentioned,\u201d Irwin said. \u201cA lot of those yearbooks will just show the team picture or the assistant coaches and that\u2019s it. How do you know who they are? You have to do as much diving as you can. You can see a picture that says last year\u2019s homecoming queen Lisa Jones crowns this year\u2019s homecoming queen Marisa Jones, or whatever. Now you have two names.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Delvan Irwin did not intend to become one of the leading historians on Mississippi high school football. Ten…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-515207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115408330333846337","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}