Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – Three Orange Beach students wanted to do something to bring attention to the high school’s football home football game. And, they ended up getting national recognition with mentions on ESPN’s Gameday TikTok account and the ESPN Instagram page.

Tripp Carter, Caden Ford and Myles Morgan came up with the idea to mimic ESPN’s College Game Day for the Makos game with Booker T. Washington High School from Tuskegee. Their TikTok video got more than 70,000 views and was noticed by ESPN. (See video below the article.)

“Me and Myles took to TikTok in hopes of Gameday seeing what we had done,” Carter said. “That’s when Myles’ post reached 70k likes he got a DM from ESPN College Football on Instagram asking if they could use our video. Of course, we said yes.”

It all grew out of a tradition at the new school to have a different theme for the student section for home games.

“So basically, our school had come up with the theme of ‘dress as your type’ as our Friday night student section theme, so when I had seen that I knew we had to change it to something awesome to get the fans going and try to power our team to a first-round playoff win,” Carter said. “So, with that being said it hit me, let’s bring College Gameday to Orange Beach.”

First, he had to find someone to help bring his idea to life with little time to spare.

“I proposed the idea to friends Caden Ford and Myles Morgan as I knew all of our personalities would mesh perfectly for this and I knew we could get it done on three days’ notice,” Carter said. “So, we quickly spread the word and got everyone along with the idea. At this point it was already Wednesday and we had nothing. We quickly got on it Wednesday night and made a couple calls to get banners made to match the Gameday Setup and gave it a twist ‘High School Gameday.’”

They needed signs, a set, filming and other electronic equipment to pull off a classy version of the popular college football show broadcast every Saturday morning during the season.

“Luckily, Myles’ dad has a business called ‘Signs and Graphics’ located in Hoover and it just so happened to be that Myles’ mom was in Birmingham and was coming back home Friday,” Carter said. “And she could pick them up, so we were able to get them quickly. We were able to get speakers and all as well as a camera to shoot the whole entire thing.”

One thing all three fellows agreed on was it had to be as close to the real thing as three high school students could make it in the three-day timeframe. They were happy with the results.

“We knew if we were gonna do it, we had to do it right and professionally as well,” Carter said. “Come Friday we had all the materials needed and dressed up as if we were the analysts themselves, suit and all, and headed to the field to start setting up. As soon as we set it up, we knew it would be special.”

The suits weren’t the only thing the students brought to the show. It was complete with predictions of other playoff games from the area and even the prediction of the Game of the Week, Orange Beach v. Washington.

“As the show started, we were able to make our picks and predictions on other Alabama high school playoff football games and coming down to our game of the week,” Carter said. “We were able to drill it with the mascot head and all. It couldn’t have gone any better. We loaded up the footage and took to social media.”

They may have won social media by adroitly pulling off their ingenious plan, but the Makos lost a barnburner, 46-43, to the visiting Golden Eagles from Macon County.