MAGNOLIA, AR (KTAL/KMSS) — Adam Kirby is in his third season as head coach at Magnolia High School, where he has taken the program to a new level. Kirby lost a few key players, but the Panthers are still returning a lot of veteran talent, making the emphasis this offseason on fine-tuning the offense. "Now everybody has our tape, we’re not gonna sneak up on anybody," Kirby said. Last year, the Magnolia Panthers abandoned the spread and broke out the double wing offense, and it worked. "We averaged 41 points per game, but again, a lot of that is just cause you don’t see the double wing in Arkansas. It’s big in Louisiana, especially central Louisiana so I think we caught a lot of people off guard, especially early in the season," Kirby said. Now that the Panthers no longer have the element of surprise as a tool, it’s all about perfecting. "Year two of the offense, we know what we were expecting, we came in and we knew what we were running, we knew the playbook," said senior Jackson Woolfley. "Now it’s just repetition, running it over and over again until we get it perfect and I think we’ve done that and we’re gonna be really good." One advantage they have is that familiarity. "Offensively we’ve got everyone coming back, we’ve got the whole o line coming back, both of our wing backs are coming back," Kirby said. However one essential piece of the offense will come down to fall camp. "Our quarterback battle, we’ve got three guys battling it out with Tucker Venable, Titus Nelson and Lincoln Nelson, all three are capable of running the offense, it’s just a matter of which one is going to be the starter," Kirby said. It’s not just the players Kirby has pushed to their limits. "I’ve challenged our OC, when we’re in team periods in practice to think off the top of his head, because everyone goes into a game with a script of what you want to run but when that gets shut down, you have to make adjustments quick," Kirby said. "So I really challenge him to go into each practice with five base plays we feel good about and then off that I challenge him to make adjustments during practice, whether that’s an overloaded formation, or a different motion, or a different way to look at a formation." After a summer of X’s and O’s, the Panthers are ready to get back to it. "I love the physicality of the game, every time I see someone lined up across from me, I like the feeling of hitting someone," Woolfley said. The Panthers kick of the 2026 season on August 28, as El Dorado comes to town for the 7 pm kickoff.
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