Hotty Toddy Tate County

Photo from Senatobia High School annual: Hugh Freeze as senior
quarterback for Senatobia High School, with fellow Warriors #23 Rodney
Reed and #22 Fredrick Newson, 1987

When one looks at the 82 Mississippi counties, its easy to claim every county seat as a Hotty Toddy hometown. Early on game day mornings, the Ole Miss pennants and signs are up from Tunica to the coast and all the way back up to Iuka in the state’s top right corner. Ride into any small Mississippi downtown, and you’ll find almost all the local doctors and lawyers and many of town fathers are Ole Miss alums who are proud Rebels and quick to tell you they bleed red and blue.

While whole groups of Rebels live and breath and die Ole Miss with their hometown buddies, when its all over and the game didn’t go Ole Miss’ way, they hit the sack ready to get Sunday’s take on the game and check out where Eli is playing. But in Tate County, Mississippi, while all that is going on, there is this other extra Ole Miss thing they all know and feel. It motivates, inspires, thrills, and can cut them to the quick. Every fan of any Tate County high school sports team along with the Northwest Ranger’s fans, the Memphis Tiger fans, even the State fans and most certainly the Rebel fans, all have a little bigger chunk of their hearts in the Ole Miss score. Because you see, Ole Miss’ rising star head coach Hugh Freeze is one of their own. He’s a Tate County boy.

Tate County is spread out across northern Mississippi ,and although its doesn’t feel that close, the county borders Lafayette County and Oxford. Named for one of the first prominent settlers of the area, Thomas Simpson Tate, the county has no less than ten towns and communities. Every one of them is a Hotty Toddy Hugh Freeze town.

It’s little known that Hugh Freeze was actually born in Oxford, as his father was finishing his master’s degree. When Freeze was five, the family moved to Independence, Mississippi, where they have remained. While his sports life started with T-ball in Independence, Hugh played sports on every ball field and court in Tate County. He was the senior quarterback for the Senatobia High Warriors and later played and starred with the Northwest CC Rangers in Senatobia.

His family believe his hard work on the family’s dairy farm was a good solid start.

“He learned his work habits,” Danny Freeze, his father, said. “A dairy farm will teach you how to work.”

“It didn’t matter from elementary school on — everybody he was around, they would follow him,” said his mother, Rita Freeze.

And so as the wild ride that is Rebel football and Ole Miss’ longing for the “Glory Days: Part 2”, pushes forward, the good folks, young and old, in Tate County, Mississippi, will be doing what they’ve been doing for years, following Hugh Freeze. And when the game is over and the final score is just that, final, the folks in Tate County up on I-55 believe they are going to see years of beaming with pride, rehashing every coaching decision and claiming how well they knew young Hugh, way back when.

–John Cofield