Morris Higginbotham

Morris Higginbotham played football at Phillips High School in Birmingham before graduating. He would play minor league baseball for a while until enrolling at the University of Alabama at the age of 24. His first head coaching job was at Walnut Grove in 1952 where his team finished with a 7-2-1 record. Higginbotham moved over to West Blocton the next year replacing Chuck Sweeney who had recently resigned to join the Air Force. At the time he was playing baseball in Tuscaloosa and working on his Masters degree at Alabama. In 1953 he took the head position at West Blocton where in five years his teams were named State Champions twice by the Birmingham News and Post-Herald (1955-56). Higginbotham stepped down as the coach of the Tigers following the 1957 season and served as the head football coach at B.B. Comer for one year with a 5-4-1 record. He moved to Enterprise High School for the 1959 season. The next year, his Enterprise Wildcats team won another title as awarded by the Birmingham News and the ASWA. He stepped aside at Enterprise after the 1961 season before taking over the football program at Hueytown for five years. His Golden Gophers went a combined 27-17-4. Between high school head coaching jobs he was the head coach at Livingston University from 1967-1969 before returning to the high school ranks as the head coach at Scottsboro in 1970. He stayed at Scottsboro for only two seasons before moving on to Hewitt-Trussville in 1972 for another four years before finishing out his coaching career in a return trip to Hueytown High School. Coach Higginbotham is recognized as one of the greatest coaches of his era. His head coaching career began in 1952 with Walnut Grove and would span a total of thirty-one years and eight high schools before he finally retired following the 1981 season at Hueytown. His overall high school football record is 161-75-11 as a head coach. His son, Robert, coached for many years and also found great success. They rank as the winningest father/son duo in state high school football history. As a father and son combination their record was 485-201-26. Named coach of the year twice, he had 24 players who went on to play in college. He is a member of the AHSAA Hall of Fame, being elected in 1993. Coach Morris Higginbotham would pass away on June 13, 2011.