This evening, right around half past five, the whole thing starts the way it has to start — at the old school.
The Smyrna homecoming parade lines up at John Bassett Moore Intermediate on Frazier Street, and if that name doesn’t ring a bell the way it should, here it is: that building was Smyrna High School. It was the high school until 1970, when the new one opened out on Duck Creek Parkway, and for the twenty years before that the Eagles played their football on the ground right beside it. The field lights went up in 1950. Generations of Smyrna kids walked out of that building on Friday afternoons and straight into a football game.
So when the floats roll off Frazier Street this evening — red and white everywhere, candy handed out instead of thrown, the way the school’s Student Government Association runs it — the 70th homecoming in Smyrna history is starting in the exact spot the first ones did. Seventy years. That’s the school’s own count, and they’re proud of it: the SGA’s parade memo this fall invites the whole community out “as we celebrate 70 Years of Homecomings in our community.”
By the time the parade’s done, everybody drifts out to Duck Creek Parkway, because tonight is not some soft little ceremony with a football game attached. Smyrna plays Caesar Rodney at Charles V. Williams Stadium, kickoff moved to a special 7:30 start for homecoming, and this game is the real thing. Both teams are 5-1. There are four 5-1 teams stacked on top of each other in Class 3A District 2 — Smyrna, Caesar Rodney, Sussex Central and Cape Henlopen — and Friday night’s winner walks away with the inside track to the district title and the playoffs.
Mike Judy’s Eagles have earned their half of that record the hard way. Their only loss all season was a 32-26 fight with Salesianum at Delaware Stadium, and they answered it last week by hanging 48 points on a Cape Henlopen team that hadn’t lost a game all year — 48 to nothing, with defensive lineman Marquis Neal sacking Cape’s quarterback four times by himself. The week before that they beat Middletown in the Harvest Bowl, 32-21, their first win over the Cavaliers since 2022. Quarterback Drew Marks runs the offense, sophomore Terrell Ingram runs like he’s got somewhere to be, and Caesar Rodney’s bringing a defense that hasn’t given up more than 10 points in a game since Week 2, with quarterback Gavin Johnson dealing on the other side. Nobody scheduled an easy night for anybody. That’s how it should be.
At halftime they announce the winning class floats and crown the Homecoming King and Queen, the way it’s been done under those lights for as long as anybody in the stands can remember. And the lights themselves carry a name worth saying out loud once a year: Charles V. Williams — teacher, coach, principal, superintendent, four decades in this school district, a World War II veteran who came home with a Purple Heart. He died in 2014, one year before Smyrna finally won its first state championship. Friday night gets played in his stadium, on his town’s biggest Friday of the year.
Saturday night the kids get the last word, with the homecoming dance closing out the weekend. Smyrna High School graduated its first class in 1894. The school has been the center of this town for more than 130 years, through two buildings, one world war’s worth of Williams, and seventy homecomings — and the beautiful thing about a homecoming in a town like this is that it isn’t really about the current students. It’s about everybody who ever wore the red and white coming back to stand in the same cold October air and argue about which team was better.
One last thing, and it’s our favorite part: this story exists because a reader wrote in and told us it mattered. Lorie Twenge of Smyrna — the Good News Lady, as she’s known around our little newsroom now — messaged us this week and said, in so many words, don’t just cover the bad stuff, cover this. So we are. Seventy years of Fridays, Smyrna. See you at the parade.
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