It appeared to be a mismatch: The North Georgia champion Lemon Street Hornets of Marietta playing the William Bryant High Rams of Moultrie for the Georgia Interscholastic Association’s 1961 Class A championship.

Although the Rams had a ferocious defense that had given up just two touchdowns all season, Lemon Street was coming down from Atlanta with a team that had eight shutouts of its own and the expectation of winning the championship against the team from the small Southwest Georgia town of Moultrie.

But the Hornets got a taste of South Georgia football that December night at Mack Tharpe Stadium.

The Rams scored once in each half and blanked the Hornets, 12-0.

Bryant High finished 9-0 and earned the first state football championship by any team in Colquitt County. It came 33 years before Colquitt County High won its first and only championship in 1994.

And the Colquitt County Sports Hall of Fame is honoring the 1961 Rams on the 50th anniversary of their state championship.

Six members of the team are expected to attend the Hall of Fame banquet, set for Thursday night at the Colquitt County High cafeteria.

The team also will be recognized before Friday’s Colquitt County-Tift County football game at Tom White Field at Mack Tharpe Stadium.

“We had a great team,” Willie Gene Motley, a tackle on the team, said when interviewed on  the 30th anniversary of the state championship.

“We were well-disciplined. We were just hard-nosed and well-disciplined.”

 The team included George Turner, James Brown, Fred Daniels, Nathaniel Smith, Robert Jackson, Shelly Neal, Willie Buie, Cleveland Hunt, Robert Bearden, Eugene Phillip Watts, Roosevelt White, James Davis, Amos Walker, Jerry Ward, Willie Robinson, Bennie Enoch, Willie Harris, Willie Thomas, David McKinnon, Robert Bethune, Willie Roney, Clifford Melvin, Freddie Johnson, Leonard Upshaw, Robert Jackson, Robert Daniels and Johnny Baker. John Yearby was the manager.

Brown, George Turner and Amos Walker were named to the all-conference team.

The head coach was A.F. Shaw, who earned the only state championship during his long career as the Rams head coach.

 His assistant was Ralph Taylor, who later became the school’s head coach after Shaw died in 1965.

Shaw, Taylor and Amos Walker, who played all the skill positions on the field for the Rams, have been inducted into the Colquitt County Sports Hall of Fame.

William Bryant had gone 8-1 in 1960 and hopes were high for another excellent season.

The maroon-and-gray Rams opened with five straight shutouts, blanking Washington High of Cairo 39-0 (on Oct. 6, exactly 50 years before the Hall of Fame banquet); Hutto of Bainbridge, 12-0; Douglass of Thomasville, 31-0; Sumter County 34-0; and Magnolia of Thomas County 33-0.

Bryant then defeated Camilla Consolidated 20-6 and won its first playoff game 14-6 when it went on the road to play Center High of Waycross.

In the state semifinal, the Rams hit the road again, traveling to Thomson to eliminate McDuffie County Training 19-0.

In a 1991 interview on the 30th anniversary of the state championship, Ralph Taylor remembered Lemon Street, which was 10-0-1, rolling confidently into Moultrie.

Coach Thomas Adger’s Hornets only blemish was a 0-0 tie with Fair Street High of Gainesville and they had just defeated the Hunt High Tigers of Ft. Valley 21-13 to win the North Georgia championship.

“Lemon Street had a good football team,” said Taylor, who died in 2000. “They had more players than we had ever seen. We thought we were playing a college team. Even their band had about 200 people.

“They were big compared to us. We were just a little country school. And they had the attitude that they were going to beat us.”

Motley, who is sole remaining member of the team still living in Moultrie, remembers Lemon Street bringing “six or seven bus loads” from Marietta.

“They just knew they were going to take (the championship) back with them,” he said.

But Bryant High co-captain James Brown intercepted a pass thrown by Leon Street quarterback Zelma Freeman in the second quarter and later scored on a 4-yard run to give the Rams a 6-0 lead.

Brown completed the scoring with a 32-yard touchdown pass to Fred Daniels in the third quarter.

According to the story written by L. “Pony” Jones that appeared in the Dec. 9, 1961, Moultrie Observer, some 3,500 fans — both black and white, including a number of players on the Moultrie High football team — turned out for the game.

Taylor said Colquitt County merchants assisted in purchasing state championship jackets for the players.