FAIRVIEW, Ala. – In 2025, the Fairview Aggies had one of their most successful seasons in school history, dominating on the gridiron on the way to a 10-0 regular season record and a trip to the playoffs. In the 5A playoffs, the team got to the third round, losing a heartbreaker to Scottsboro. After the historic season that saw head coach George Redding become the winningest coach in county and school history in his 19th season, the program continued an effort look backwards, and inwards.
To say culture and respect for the history of the school are important to Redding is a crude understatement. Over the last handful of years, it’s been a priority to have the foundations of the program displayed in their field house.
As soon as you enter the building, you’re greeted with a wall displaying photos of players, moments and coaches that have defined the program. Some are as recent as the last couple seasons, showing Coach Redding and his son, senior quarterback Kolt Redding, but go back all the way to when football facemasks only had one bar. Across the hall, the “legacy wall” holds plaques noting every achievement by a Fairview team or player.
With an empty section of wall adjacent, and a growing desire to immerse the team in its’ history, Redding began brainstorming a new way to do just that. The plan: to commission the designing and installation of a timeline wall that would showcase every Aggie team and its’ most notable players and coaches going all the way back to the program’s creation in 1963.
“I think we’re in a day and time now where we look at our young people and we go ‘they don’t have respect for anything’ and I think its important for us to teach our young people the things that they need to respect, the things that are important, because they don’t know that its important unless you tell them it is,” said Redding.
Redding, a former star quarterback at Fairview under Cullman County Hall of Fame head coach Dafford Smith, oozes passion for the school, the community and his program. With the program under his watch, he’d need to put the bulk of the project in the hands of someone else. So, he presented the task to a man who personifies every bit of that love for the school- a former Fairview student, quarterback, football coach and former principal of Fairview Elementary- Marty Hardman.
In his garage speckled with Aggies memorabilia, and sitting on a Fairview basketball stool that looks fresh off the sidelines, Hardman detailed the process of putting together the wall. He says after Redding presented him with the idea, he got to work sifting through yearbooks, over 60 of them in totality.
He collected team photos from every single one, and then searched through newspaper archives in the library to find additional shots. Creating the graphic itself was Creative Design, a Cullman-based design company that Hardman collaborated with. Between trips back and forth to Creative Design to deliver photos and see the updated graphics, plus the research and collection process, Hardman estimates he spent nearly 50 hours on the project.
He’s a recent retiree from his position at the elementary school, but instead of taking a backseat, he continues to contribute to the community and football program that has his family’s fingerprints all over it. His nephew, Trett, was a star Aggie quarterback who graduated in 2010 and went on to play at Samford University. Another nephew, quarterback Parker Martin, was the Alabama 5A Back of the Year for the school in 2021.
While his siblings attended school, his mother, a substitute teacher, would bring him along to her classes. Then, after going through all of primary school as an Aggie and graduating in 1985 he became a volunteer football coach and began working on a degree so he could work at Fairview full-time. “Outside of my wife and kids, it’s all I’ve ever known, it’s it means a lot, and I enjoy it. Sometimes I get a little bit too deep and too involved, I guess. I just love it, and that project that was just ton of fun,” Hardman said.
Just a few months after the idea was hatched, the wall was completed in December, with all 62 years of program history on display. It was exactly what Redding envisioned, hundreds of photos to honor each and every player and coach to ever wear the purple and yellow. While it was received with excitement by the team a month ago, Redding says that every day he walks into the building there’s almost always someone standing and looking at the photos, digging through the memories.
“That’s what this was all about. It’s funny, the more you look at this, the more you find. There’s so many things that are embedded in the background, and then when you start thinking about something you start walking a little closer and you see a snapshot, you start picking out people, you start seeing old friends, you see your old coaches, and it triggers a story of some sort, and I think that’s one of the greatest feelings ever.
Hardman and Redding are Fairview lifers, former students and star quarterbacks, it’s easy to understand their passion for the team, but the Aggies’ culture and family feel has a way of sucking in outsiders, too. Defensive coordinator Brian Simmons attended and graduated from West End High, near Gadsden, and was hired as the defensive play caller just a couple weeks after Redding accepted the head coaching job.
He said in all honesty, with zero ties to the area, he expected to be gone after a single season. “Now, we look back on those pictures and you see some where our oldest kids were just four years old down on the sidelines, and you remember when they had us chasing them around the field house,” Simmons said, adding “You look back at that history and you realize (Coach Redding’s) the winningest coach Fairview’s ever had, and I’ve been a part of every single one of those with him.”
Despite the work that’s already been put in to preserve the program’s history, they’re not done yet. The program is currently in one of the richest periods of its’ history, and there was space left blank intentionally so that one day they can fill it in with future seasons.
On his effort to cement the culture and history of Fairview despite such a successful present, Redding said “They call old things ‘traditional,’ and those stories will go away unless we tell them, and we have to keep telling those old stories about the past, the good days. That’s something that’s always had a special place in my heart.”
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