Jackson Daily leads Airedales to playoffs
By Kevin Taylor
Alma Schools
Adam Daily still relishes a small football given to him by his mother almost 25 years ago.
Back in the mid-90s, high school cheerleaders throughout the South hurled tiny footballs sponsored by local insurance agencies, car dealers, and banks into bleachers. The late Valerie (Treece) Elam grabbed one and immediately took out her pen.
“My mom liked to keep things and write on them,” explains Daily, one of the school’s elite defensive players who helped lead Alma to a 1997 state championship win over Hamburg.
“She had a little football that State Farm would throw out to the fans,” Daily continued. “We were playing Bentonville in the first game of the new stadium (redesign) back in 1995. I kicked the first extra point and field goal. She wrote on them, ‘Adam kicked the first PAT and twisted his ankle … and had to come out.’
“I still have it.”
Daily is among one of the best football players to come out of Alma. But he may not be the best ever — and certainly not the first great player in his family.
His father Marvin once churned out 1,306 yards and scored 22 touchdowns for the 1970 Airedales, a Billy Bock-coached group that reached the quarterfinals of the state playoffs. The late Marvin Daily even had a unique nickname. “They called him ‘Freight Train’ Daily,” Adam said.
This season, almost 50 years after Marvin’s last hurrah, and 26 seasons following Adam’s ‘97 state title win over Hamburg, another Daily helped lead the Airedales back to the state playoffs — the team’s first outright post-season berth since 2019.
Move over Marvin and Adam, and meet Jackson.
Though Jackson Daily’s prep career came to an abrupt halt thanks, in part to Harrison’s hail-mary that dropped Alma to a No. 4 seed and a first-round date with No. 1 Parkview, he put up the type of numbers Adam expected from him.
In just 10 games (Alma was awarded a forfeit win when Dardanelle elected to forfeit on Oct. 27), Daily passed for 1,308 yards and 10 touchdowns and averaged 7.1 yards per carry while finishing the season with 818 yards and 21 touchdowns — one fewer than his late grandfather scored in 1970.
"I always thought Jackson had the ability to do it; I thought when he was a sophomore he had the ability to do it,” Adam said. “He’s (Jackson) a strong kid. He’s hard-nosed and I never once doubted him.”
After inserting him as the quarterback last spring, and watching him progress, Alma coach Rusty Bush knew he had his next quarterback.
“Really, if you go all the way back to after the last football game last year, we visited and Jackson said he wanted to be the quarterback,” Bush said. “Really, I had no idea how this thing was going to go. He’s a good kid and a hard worker, and obviously a really good football player, but we didn’t know how the progression to quarterback was going to be. But as we worked with him through the winter, and through our quarterback school, I would watch him a couple of days a week … and after two or three weeks I looked at our coaches and thought this kid had a chance to be the real deal.
“You saw him gradually getting better.”
One of the biggest things Daily did, says Bush, was to get stronger.
“He changed his body through the weight room,” the coach said. “He can run better, throw better, and just make better decisions. He wanted to make this program a winning program again and go play for a conference championship. That doesn’t mean it didn’t come with some bumps and bruises.”
“I’ve been playing quarterback ever since I was in the seventh grade, so it’s kind of been my dream to be the quarterback of Alma,” Jackson Daily explained. “To get the opportunity is great to have the success I’ve been having, and hopefully to continue that.”
As for the numbers? Daily expected big things because of the skilled players around him.
“I kind of expected it to be like that,” he said. “We have awesome players, too. We have a good offensive line and great receivers, so it’s helped me out a lot.”
Peyton’s Place
Leave it to Alma quarterback coach Peyton Morris to come up with a quirky catchphrase following Jackson Daily’s worst performance of the football season.
The analogy of a quarterback is that one bad day doesn’t necessarily lead to another one. Such was the case on the last Friday of September when Daily completed just five passes against one of the worst defenses in the state — then followed that game with a record-setting, jaw-dropping game a week later that re-wrote the record books.
Just one week following Alma’s 45-14 win over Clarksville, Jackson Daily torched eventual 5A-West champion Farmington for a school-record 320 rushing yards and scored five touchdowns as the Airedales throttled the Cardinals, 56-35. Daily punctuated the Airedales’ rout with a 90-yard jaunt — racing from his own 10 to the other end of the field without anyone laying a finger on him.
The affable Morris said Daily is like a well-tooled Jeep.
”We have a saying, it’s called a Jeep — I can take my Jeep anywhere,” Morris explained. “I can take it cross country, on a dirt road … it doesn’t matter. A Jeep is always a Jeep, and that’s Jackson. He’s the same all the time; it doesn’t matter if he’s successful or not.
“He knows that we have complete trust in him, no matter if he played poorly in a game or not. He knows we’re going to come right back to him.”
“We sat down and he (Morris) really simplified things for me,” Daily said. “I love being around him. It’s awesome having a relationship like that. He has a lot of experience; him being at the next level has really helped us.” A Lavaca native, Morris coached at Ouachita Baptist before being hired away by Bush (at first because of his special teams expertise) to coach quarterbacks.
As for his Clarksville clunker, Daily leaned on the words of seven-time Super Bowl champion Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr.
“I’m a big Tom Brady fan and that’s one of the things he talks about; you can’t let one play determine the next play, so we had to forget about it and go on to the next game with Farmington,” Daily said. “Obviously, that was a really big game for us. You have to keep going and working hard.”
Jackson ‘Jeep’ Daily may not end his Alma football career as the most prolific play-maker in the school’s esteemed football history. But he certainly has done enough to turn the heads of college coaches, just as his dad Adam did nearly 25 years ago.
Missouri coach and former Airedale Eli Drinkwitz has offered Daily a ‘preferred walkon’ opportunity with the nationally-ranked Tigers’ program. Arkansas Tech coach and former Morrilton Devil Dog Kyle Shipp has an offer on the table as well.
Jackson Daily wants to play at the next level.
“I really want to play at the next level and become a coach, that’s kind of what my goal has been,” Daily said. “I have two offers right now, Southern Missouri and Arkansas Tech, and I have preferred walk-on from Missouri. Hopefully, I can get more as the season goes along.”
“The first thing Jackson has done is to put himself in a position to be successful,” Morris said. “He meets with us on Sunday afternoon, he meets with me extra, and he’s taken the time to learn what we’ve asked him to do. He understands not just concepts, (but) he understands why we’re calling things against defenses. It’s helping him play faster, too.
Back in the day
Long before Jackson Daily’s accent into the Alma record books, Marvin and Adam left their imprint as well. Marvin Daily scored 43 career TDs between 1968-70 and Jackson was even better, scoring 17 touchdowns during the team’s ‘97 state title run, kicking five field goals, and was in 146 tackles — which puts him in third place all-time behind Curtis Loyd (165 tackles) and Chad Nerenberg (151) set in 2014 and 1992, respectively.
Daily kicked four field goals during his sophomore season, the year in which Alma replaced its aging wooden bleachers with what you see today.
The old stadium had some other unusual quirks, too.
"I remember the middle of the field was always a mudhole about this time of year,” Adam Daily said. “There was a lot of drainage underneath there; you had a lot of fill (dirt)."
The field was uneven, too.
"I always felt like when we were going north, we were going to roll them (opponents) over,” Daily said. “But as it turns out, we should have been doing that toward the south end zone, because the field dropped like six feet and no one ever knew about it except for coach Vines.”
“I never saw Adam play, but I knew the name,” recants Bush, the Airedales’ fourth-year coach. “I was at Henderson (State) from ‘94 to ‘99. I was a GA (graduate assistant) with Keith (Fimple). We had Lee (Daily). I actually helped coach Lee when he was a freshman linebacker for us. Hearing about Adam, and having Fimple with me there at Henderson, you heard all the stories. I was an Arkansas High School kid … I grew up chasing all the stories. I saw Lee probably the day after I got the job here.
“I tell all these college coaches, ‘Man, it’s in his (Jackson Daily) DNA … that’s a big part of it. Not only does he have good DNA, but he has a good family, and that’s what small-town high school football is all about.”
‘Hello, this is President Clinton’
Three months following Alma’s remarkable ‘97 state title run, Adam and older brother Lee had gathered with other family members at his grandmother Inez’s house. The date was March 5, 1998. At 2 o’clock that afternoon, less than three hours after his grandfather, Brooks Treece passed away, the phone rang.
“Hello, Treece residence,” answered Adam. “This is a phone call from the office of the President of the United States.”
A man with a distinctive voice picked up. “Hello, this is President Clinton.”
“My grandfather died at 11 a.m. and by 2 o’clock President Clinton called and talked to my grandma for three hours,” Adam Daily said. “He (Treece) ran the Crawford County Democratic Committee; he was really close with the Clintons.”
Brooks Treece passed away two weeks following his 69th birthday, Daily said.
“He (President Clinton) would fly into town when he was Governor, or even after that, and my grandpa would pick him up,” Daily explained. “President Clinton would tell him, ‘Bring me every local newspaper you can get your hands on so I know what’s happening.’ They were pretty close.
“He would show up somewhere and, after reading some papers, would be caught up with local events.”
‘This group is special’
It’s 9:24 p.m. … the last game of the season was over, some might say, by halftime. A light mist is falling from the darkened skies above War Memorial Stadium.
As seniors hugged one another, some wiping away tears, Adam emerged wearing his signature shorts and proudly wearing an Airedale T-shirt. This isn’t the end, he proclaims.
"This group is special," Adam Daily said. "Alma hasn't had a tough-knit group like this in a while. We've got a few seniors that are really good leaders and they're good kids and they play awesome together."
“Dad always talks about his senior year,” Jackson Daily said. “They played Greenwood twice that year and lost to them twice, but somehow they tied for the conference championship, and nobody gave them much of a chance in the playoffs.
“They were the fourth seed, and they ultimately upset Hamburg in the state championship game.”