Feeder Frenzy

No one would have predicted it. No one in Elizabethtown, Ky., in 1998 and ‘99 would have looked at the seventh and eighth graders playing for T.K. Stone Middle School and guessed they would someday reach the 2003 state championship game as high school seniors. “I don’t remember their record but they were pretty much a .500 team in seventh and eighth grade,” former Elizabethtown High School coach Brett Burnett said. “But that was a group of kids that really bought into what we did, stuck with it and worked hard. We didn’t have a lot of outstanding athletes but we had a lot of blue-collar kids and they came up through the program and played for a state championship their senior year.” Today, Burnett is preparing for his first season at Pelham High School in suburban Birmingham, Ala. Part of his plan to build a winning program is to construct a bridge to connect the high