CEDAR BLUFF – Cedar Bluff defensive coordinator Mark Mitchell is known to show a lot of emotion on the football field on Friday nights. Most of those emotions have to do with a missed assignment by a player or a bad call by an official.

But on Friday, when the Tigers hosted Spring Garden, another type of emotion came over the rough and tough Mitchell.

His son, 11-year-old Will Mitchell, has an as-yet undiagnosed heart ailment he’s battled since last spring. Will passed out at school on Tuesday morning after an irregular heartbeat. He was taken to a local hospital, where doctors fitted him with a heart monitor. Will was resting at home on Friday evening.

“It may be just something they (doctors) can treat with medicine. It may be nothing, but it’s the unknown that scares you,” Mark Mitchell said. “He’s got something where if he gets real hot, he’ll pass out. Tuesday morning, he just falls out in class. He wore a heart monitor (Thursday), and his heartbeat was over 200 beats a minute while he was at P.E.”

Will’s presence was missed by the Cedar Bluff players at the game on Friday. The sixth grader has been a staple on the Tiger sideline as a water boy the past two years.

When the Tiger players learned of Will’s absence, they dedicated their game with Spring Garden to him. Cedar Bluff won behind two defensive stands in the final minute of the game, 12-8.

“He was just devastated he couldn’t come to the game, and we just dedicated it to him,” Cedar Bluff junior running back/defensive back Marcus Reese said. “Will and the managers are as big a part of this team as the rest of us. They get stuff to care for us and get us water. They help us out a lot, and he plays a big role in our games.”

Mitchell said he informed the team of his son’s condition at halftime.

“I told all the kids at halftime ‘There ain’t nobody that wants to win this game more than my son,’” Mitchell said. “I told him today ‘You can come to the game, but you’re only going to be able to wipe the balls off. You can’t run the balls in until we find out what’s going on.’ He said ‘I don’t want to go,’ and I said ‘Why?’ He said ‘You want to go to a game you can’t coach? I don’t want to go to a game I can’t manage.’

“Will has 20-something brothers in there (the locker room). They get on him, and he gets on them. It’s a family. I said I want to be able to make the phone call at the end of the game and tell my son we won the game.”

Thanks to the Tiger players, Mitchell was able to make that call. He said he was proud of the effort his defensive players gave on Friday night.

“I’m rough and I’m tough on them, but they did everything I asked them to do to win the game,” he said. “I thought we had a good plan, and our kids executed it. They deserve the credit for the win.”