It’s September, a day before the homecoming game, and the Yellow Jackets are having a light walk-through. Players sweat through their school clothes as their coach, Chris Jones, 41 and still athletic enough to keep up, reviews the game plan. The mood is light, with a parade to honor the team set to take place downtown in two hours.

“It’s like we’re celebrities,” says Braylon Burnside, a star wide receiver with a wide smile and thick braids that sprout from his head like a fountain.

They’re all teenagers, young enough to still dream the dreams their parents had to abandon. From the time they were toddlers, chasing down mini footballs behind the goal posts in the same stadium where they now dazzle thousands each Friday, Petty, Burnside and their YND buddies have known where football can take them. So they climb.

“We want to be rich one day,” Petty says of his chain.

And getting there, at least the way they see it, requires playing a sport that has been declining in participation across the country for nearly two decades, as evidence of its danger mounts. But it shows no signs of ever dying here. Not in a state where the incentives, families say, outweigh any fears. In a state, the country’s poorest, where hope isn’t easy to find.

High-schoolers here play tackle football at a higher rate than any state in the country, an analysis by The Washington Post found, and it’s one of just two states, with Alabama, where participation is notably rising. In the past decade, the high school football participation rate in Mississippi has risen 20 percent, more than anywhere else in the country. Recite that information to someone from here, and the response will be a “sounds-about-right” head nod.

The reasons are many: Country culture. Little else to do for fun or a way out. Rural kids who understand the value of hard work. Family tradition and pressure, from uncles, fathers, cousins and grandparents, to add to the legacy or create new ones. Coaches here know that when they see certain surnames on the roster, there’s a decent chance they will have a good season. Some here say football is the reason a lot of kids bother to attend school.

“Football is it here,” Jones says.

Nine Pro Football Hall of Famers are from Mississippi, including the greatest wide receiver ever (Jerry Rice), arguably the greatest running back ever (Walter Payton) and one of the greatest quarterbacks (Brett Favre). At the last Super Bowl, no state had more participants than Mississippi (eight). With 32 players on NFL opening day rosters this season, Mississippi ranks fourth-most per capita — one NFL player per 92,540 people — behind Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, a level of representation that makes backyard fantasies feel like practice.

And in a place where 120-foot-tall crosses are common sights, fear of brain injury is, to many here, negated by mothers and grandmothers who pray for no harm on their children and view the attending success as a blessing.

Especially here, in Starkville, a college town that carries the ironic nickname StarkVegas. Located in Mississippi’s Golden Triangle, it was historically part of the South’s black belt prairie, a stretch of land from northeast Mississippi extending into Alabama that was once blanketed by slave-labor plantations. The rich, black soil once used for cotton production is now fertile ground for some of the most successful football programs in the state.

Starkville High won the Class 6A state championship last fall, its seventh overall. If the Yellow Jackets can win the next night’s homecoming game and keep winning after that, they could go back-to-back, boosting not just pride in where they’re from but also an insatiable desire to make it out. The disparity makes sense only through the lens of football.

“Football is the life of Mississippi,” Petty says, sharing how his face wound up on a billboard after leading Starkville to the state title. “It’s crazy.”

JERMAR MCCARTER, STARKVILLE’S middle linebacker, lives out in Moon Farm, a rural neighborhood down a blighted gravel road on the outskirts of town. He wants to do better for his mother, Marnita Kelly, who works two jobs, as a manager at a discount store and a part-time police dispatcher.

“I got to make sure my mama’s straight. It’s a must,” McCarter says of his reasons for playing football. “We go hard because a lot of us come from nothing. We don’t like to see our parents struggling. I feel like if you in my way, you stopping my family from eating.”

Trailer homes dot the neighborhood, as do abandoned, rusty trailers that have been outgrown or deemed inhabitable. There are a few brick homes around, plus some trailers with bricks laid at the base to give the appearance of a more traditional structure. Some families share lots or electricity. Others have turned tool sheds into living quarters, including one with a grill out front.

This is one of the poorest areas around Starkville, in a state where a nation-high 19 percent of residents live in poverty. But longtime Starkville assistant Willie Gillespie, who played briefly with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Minnesota Vikings, says inside those trailers and shotgun homes is a desperation that fosters defiance. Philadelphia Eagles Pro Bowl wide receiver A.J. Brown and Kansas City Chiefs starting linebacker Willie Gay, both members of the 2015 Class 6A state championship team, are products of this neighborhood.

“The house might be bigger” elsewhere, Gillespie says. “But ain’t no more love in that house than in this little bitty house here.”

Kelly appreciates being her son’s motivation, but she isn’t seeking to be rescued. The youngest of 10, she loves being surrounded by siblings and giving her children all she can, the best way she can. When Jermar started getting serious about football in seventh grade, she saved up to buy him a weight set and a shed for him to work out at 10, 11 at night.

“Rural doesn’t make it bad. It’s livable and it’s manageable, and I’m comfortable in it,” she says. “I would not trade it for anything.”

Kelly has what she calls “the entertainment home,” where family and friends are always stopping by for a good time. Jermar McCarter recalls Brown coming over with his older cousins. One of their pastimes, Brown says, was riding bikes in alleyways filled with stray dogs. “They’d try to bite us. It just gave us a rush,” he says with a smile.

Ricky Woods spent more than 30 years coaching in Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia, famously going 74-1 and winning four consecutive state titles at Mississippi’s South Panola. His last of eight state championships came at Starkville with Brown, who he says was the best player he’s ever coached. He saw in Brown — in all the kids from poor, rural areas of the state — a kind of determination that may help explain football’s hold here.

“It just seems like these kids around here have a little more toughness and desire than anything,” he says, while sharing the story of a father who once thanked him for holding a physical practice in which his son came home with bruises, and another in which his star player led the team to a state title with a separated shoulder.

He saw the same in Natrone Brooks, another member of that 2015 Starkville squad. Brooks, now a defensive back on the Atlanta Falcons’ practice squad, was about 10 when he first started breaking horses. For those living in the rural enclaves of Oktibbeha County, options for fun are limited, and riding horses is up there. Brooks has been head-butted. He’s been kicked. He once got bucked off and landed on some glass, cutting open his knee.

“I went and got it cleaned out and went right back out there,” says Brooks. “This is how you grow up. Hard-nosed. Doing all type of stuff from a young age that makes you so tough that the last thing you think about is injuries. You’re like, ‘I done been through so much, what can really break me?’ ”

THE DAY BEFORE HOMECOMING, Braylon Burnside, wearing a pair of powder blue Jordan 6s and a matching T-shirt, is on the field for Starkville’s walk-through, palming a football in one hand and snatching passes from Petty with the other. He’s cracking jokes with teammates, reminding Petty that, like Brown, he’s always open. The one-handed grabs aren’t showboating; they’re part of his preparation. “I’ve got magnets in my hands,” jokes Burnside.

Burnside goes by “Stonka,” a nickname his father Laron gave him when he was a baby, a nod to both the boy’s toughness and diapers. This week, he turned 18 and was nominated for homecoming king. He has a mentor in his “godbrother” Brown, whom he can admire from a distance on TV and the other side of the phone. Football has long been his escape. He tells his father, “Dad, I’m free. I free when I’m playing.”

The next day, the Yellow Jackets run from their field house through an inflatable tunnel. It’s homecoming — showtime in StarkVegas. Returning a punt, Burnside gets his helmet ripped off 25 yards from the end zone — and keeps running, his thick braids bounding to the delight of the crowd. The play gets called back on a penalty, but “that one still counts to me,” says Burnside, who outjumps a defender for another touchdown that helps Starkville build a 35-0 halftime lead on the way to a 49-6 win in which Jones gave his starters, including the homecoming king Burnside, the second half off.

Burnside orally committed to Mississippi State in June, but other programs never stopped lurking, using name, image and likeness packages as the lure to make him change his commitment before signing day. He de-committed in November, with Ole Miss gaining momentum. He is likely to stay in the ’Sip, his decision rooted largely in showing that his home state has talent comparable to the rest of the country.

“It’s like we’re the lowest of the low. Everybody just puts us on the bottom,” Burnside says of Mississippi. “We all just say we’re going to make it to the top. No matter how low they say we are.”

Sandra Burnside understands her son’s reasoning. “I love here. I love him here,” says Sandra, a Mississippi State alum. “We don’t want our team to be garbage.”

Still, part of her would prefer to see him go elsewhere to avoid any possible hometown distractions or trappings. Stonka wants to keep his focus on being where Brown is one day. “If I can help a kid get to where I’m at, that will be a dream fulfilled,” says Brown, an Ole Miss alum.

“YOU GON’ REMEMBER THIS,” LaToya Young shouts to fans across the field while wearing a T-shirt that reads, “Respect,” with a picture of the late Aretha Franklin. “Take it personal!”

It’s Saturday morning in West Point, and the Green Wave Packers are hosting the Starkville Cowboys in one of Mississippi pee wee football’s most intense rivalries — for the fans in the stands and then the kids, in that order.

Four games, featuring kids between ages 5 to 12, take over the field past the Daniels Done Right BBQ on Half Mile Road. The games start at 9 a.m., and the parking lot is almost full within an hour. A DJ spins hip-hop and blues classics while hundreds of fans seated in canopy tents dance and eat plates of fried chicken wings and fries.

“Ain’t nothing to do in Mississippi,” says Jones, the Starkville coach, who’s here to watch his son, Beau, play in the 11-12 game. “We’re going to make it an event now.”

Without the contest on the field, it would look like a family reunion or a small college homecoming. But there are games, so they’re watched with the same enthusiasm, trash-talking and coach-second-guessing that you could hear at Jackson State, Ole Miss or Mississippi State later in the day.

Youth tackle football participation rates are harder to track than high school. But nationwide, the percentage of kids 6 to 12 who play regularly fell 13 percent from 2019 to 2022, according to annual survey data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA). Flag football, meanwhile, is now more popular among young people.

Not here, though. Petty and Burnside both played for the Cowboys, one of the state’s most prominent youth programs. Helmets and pads are the lure before some start kindergarten. Flag football, which The Post found is being more widely adopted in wealthier communities, isn’t a serious consideration in Starkville.

“I feel like flag football is more just wear your kids out,” Petty says. “Just go out there and run.”

The Cowboys meet up three times a week at J.L. King Park, which borders one of the more low-income parts of Starkville. But it’s considered a safe space for kids to practice, and for older adults to gather at the covered picnic tables to play cards and socialize.

Rodney Johnson, head of the Cowboys program, says he doesn’t even see some parents after registration, because their kids just walk from their homes to the field. In his 15 years with the program, Johnson has come to expect that not every child who wants to play will be able to afford it, which often means raising funds and relying on corporate sponsors.

Turning them away isn’t an option, Johnson says — not given the dearth of other positive outlets for many kids. He recalls getting a phone call from a player who had been left alone by his mother for the entire weekend, leaving him to fend for himself with a pack of hot dogs. Recently, the program was gifted some tickets to a Mississippi State football game. Johnson was surprised to hear that many of the players had never seen a college campus, despite living in a college town.

“We just push, ‘Hey, you work hard, you can get out of here,’ ” Johnson says, noting the weekly advertisement of Sunday NFL games featuring Willie Gay and A.J. Brown, whose nephew plays for the pee-wee Cowboys. “They see, ‘These guys worked hard, and now they’re millionaires.’ ”

Which isn’t to say adults here aren’t aware of and concerned about the game’s risks, which are only becoming clearer. A recent study from Boston University examined the brains of 152 contact-sports participants who had died before turning age 30 and discovered that 48 of the 63 donors with CTE played football as their primary sport; two of them played only youth football.

Jennifer Bell’s son, Cameron Daniels, was about 3 when he watched a football game on TV and told his mother he wanted to play. He was disappointed that he had to wait another two years, she jokes.

She went looking for a flag football program but couldn’t find one. Then she met Burnside’s mother, Sandra, who suggested Daniels play for the Cowboys. After finally overcoming her fears, she took him to his first practice and was briefly relieved to see that her son was one of the bigger kids on the field. Then he got hit in a game. She ran onto the field to check on him.

Daniels is 9 now. He wears No. 0, so Mom does, too, recording him on her phone as he takes handoffs on offense and chases down ballcarriers on defense. Now that her son has grown to enjoy the game as much as he thought he would, she prefers to see him on the defensive side of the ball.

“Even though I didn’t like him being hit. I like to see him do the hitting,” Bell says. She winces, then grins, the ugly truth of her comment setting in. “I know,” she says, “I know.”

THE STARKVILLE HIGH players are still rubbing sleep from their eyes as the sun rises over their synthetic turf. It’s 7:30 a.m. on Monday, the first day of fall break. The Yellow Jackets are easing back into the flow after Jones gave them Sunday off as a reward for their win. The school buses aren’t running, so the staff has to hope parents or teammates can provide transportation. Otherwise, they’ll go get the players themselves.

A few arrive late. Gillespie calls Burnside, wondering why he’s not on the field. (He’s on the way.) Another straggler emerges from the locker room in pajama pants and pads. Before practice gets started, Jones, the coach, waves to the press box and asks for the blaring Lil Baby song to be paused so the players can recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Jones likes to refer to himself as a “cleat coach,” someone who provides instruction by demonstrating what he wants. Until some of his key players arrive, he lines up at running back and wide receiver. He allows rap music to be played at practice to keep the energy high, but he also knows when to provide a stern or helping hand. After a three-hour practice, lifting dumbbells in the mostly empty field house weight room, he sees two freshmen struggling. Jones puts down his weights and shows them how to spot each other.

Jones grew up in the small, rural town of Shuqalak (pronounced Sugarlock by the locals), where his family had to drive to neighboring Macon for groceries. His hometown didn’t get its first fast food restaurant, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, until he went away for college. At his school, Noxubee County, it wasn’t anything for players to ride horses to practice, tie them to a tree near the practice field and go to work.

He had the same dreams as his players. After going undrafted as a wide receiver out of Jackson State in 2005, he latched on practice squads with the Minnesota Vikings and Seattle Seahawks, then played in the Canadian Football League and Arena Football League. But as he started a family, the low wages of those leagues made those dreams costly. So Jones got into coaching.

His first head coaching job was at Kemper County, a program that had a 1-10 season before he arrived but won its first-ever state title within four seasons. That run caught the attention of Starkville High, which hired him in 2017. He recognizes his good fortune of being young, Black and leading a powerhouse program in a game, in a state, where most of the top coaches are White.

“I ain’t supposed to have this job,” Jones says.

Before every season, Jones tells his wife, Shaunacy, that a portion of his salary will be set aside to assist players, who often stop by the office to ask if he has something to eat. On some occasions, parents will ask for assistance paying the light bill.

“I’m going to make sure I take care of the product, and the product is the players,” he says. “Whether it comes out of my pocket, or whether I have to huddle with one of my coaches, because I have to beg, borrow or whatever, you know, just to make sure that these guys are able to function come Friday.”

In his first season at Starkville, while checking the college eligibility of his players, Jones discovered that one of the Yellow Jackets’ top prospects, Kameron Jones, was missing two classes. An assistant coach’s wife tutored Kameron at their home, which had the internet access he lacked in his rural neighborhood, and Kameron passed the courses needed to move on. He’s now a graduate lineman at Mississippi State after becoming the first in his household to earn a degree.

“Coach Jones is probably one of the best coaches I’ve ever seen come through a high school as far as trying to make sure the guys get to the next level,” Kameron said. “He told me straight up, ‘You’re either going to do what you need to do, or you ain’t going to have nothing.’ ”

Now, in his six seasons at Starkville, Jones has had 70 players commit on national signing day, with dozens of others heading to junior college.

“It’s like I tell kids, just go to college and it’ll change your life because you never know who you may meet and give you the next job,” Jones says. “Life is changed because they were able to use football as an avenue, a vehicle to show them something different when they probably would never got the chance.”

“Mississippi kids, we just want a chance,” he says. “If we get a chance and we get our foot in the door, we ain’t going back.”

As practice gets rolling, Petty pauses before going under center to run the first play. He’s talking to his teammates about A.J. Brown’s 175-yard, two-touchdown game a day earlier against the Washington Commanders.

A dual-threat quarterback who prefers to stay in the pocket and sling it, Petty has the quickness to extend plays or take off and make defenders dance themselves dizzy. He routinely waits to see which teammate has lifted the most weights, usually Burnside, then adds more just to claim he beat them. He plans to graduate soon and enroll at the University of Illinois in the spring.

Champaign, Ill., is a long way from Starkville. But Petty says he’s ready for the change. Basketball was his first love, but Petty chose football as his path forward after suffering a torn ACL in eighth grade and sitting out a year. The injury wasn’t a deterrent; it sparked a deeper love for football when Petty realized how much he missed the game.

When asked about the YND chain, his mom, Carrie Carter, gets emotional and fights back tears. She knows he’s getting closer to leaving home, closer to reaching those dreams.

“I just think it means a lot for him, because a lot of these kids, they don’t see a real opportunity to get out and experience the world. You’d be surprised how many kids around here, they’ve never been out of Mississippi. They’ve never been out of the South. I think a lot of them feel stuck,” says Carter. “He wants as much as he can get out of life. He dreams big but he works harder.”

In the words of one of those Lil Baby songs playing at practice, being rich “hit different when you come from zero.” And Petty doesn’t want to be the only one who makes it. “Nothing is really given to Mississippi kids. That makes it different from us and kids from other places that have more than us,” Petty says. “I don’t want to see none of them guys in jail, locked up, under the ground. I want to see all of them succeed in life.”

And so, they climb. This year, that climb will eventually take them back to the state title game, where they will fall a game short of repeating. But for now, Petty meanders toward the line, still chatting about Brown embarrassing Commanders rookie cornerback Emmanuel Forbes, another Mississippi native. “AJ on EMan,” he says, grimacing and shaking his head. Then he plops his helmet over his curls and climbs under center.

To measure tackle football participation rates, The Post collected data from the National Federation of State High School Associations’ annual reports. The NFHS doesn’t require state associations – which include public and, depending on the state, some private schools – to follow a specific process for collecting this data, and states have varying approaches to account for schools that do not submit their roster sizes. In the Post’s analysis, only boys who participated in 11-player football are included.

Alabama improved its process for collecting data “in 2013 or 14,” a spokesman said, so when analyzing change in participation over the past decade, The Post used Alabama’s 2014 mark, rather than 2013, as the beginning value. In general, years refer to the fall of an academic year, so football participation in the 2022-23 school year is described as 2022.

Most participation rates are adjusted based on public high school enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The values for 2022 are projections. When The Post analyzed trends that began before 2010, numbers were adjusted based on the U.S. population, according to intercensal estimates from the U.S. Census.

Data reporter Emily Giambalvo contributed to this report. Editing by Joe Tone. Copy editing by Ryan Romano. Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Design by Andrew Braford. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar. Projects editing by KC Schaper.