Former Perryville High School football standout Dylan Holt, 23, is well-remembered for his expertise on and off the field while playing for the Pirates. He was an all-district middle linebacker, a team leader in tackles, and a team captain. Off the gridiron, Holt was a member of the National Honor Society and graduated with Cum Laude honors.
Now that he’s approaching college graduation, Holt’s hoping to use his experiences to make a positive difference in other young people’s lives.
Taking his story back to the beginning, Holt grew up 30 minutes outside of Perryville in the small town of Altenburg.
“I went to a school out there called Altenburg Public School (APS),” he said, “and then once I graduated there in eighth grade, I jumped up to Perryville, where I played football all four years. I think I competed in weightlifting for three, basketball for two, and then I played baseball for a year. Then, I think I ended up getting everything but all-state.
“I think I ended up getting up to all-region in football. I got second-team all-conference and first-team all-district. Then, I got selected to play in the Hawaii Tiki Bowl, but because of COVID, that ended up getting moved to Florida. I can’t even remember the name of the team that I played for anymore, but we ended up smoking the team 21 to nothing — a shutout.”
In January of his senior year, Holt signed with Central Methodist University in Fayette and played reserve his freshman year.
“We won conference that year, and then we had a bunch of guys graduate, and in my sophomore year, ended up having an incident between two of my teammates where I guess they got into an argument, and one ended up taking the other one’s life. I want to say it happened three or four days before the first game or maybe before the first week of practice. I got moved up to varsity that year. Unfortunately, we ended up playing the season out and went 1 and 10.
“I started playing special teams, and then I got in a couple of games. This was the crazy part — we went home for Christmas break, and when we came back, the whole coaching staff had left, except for our head coach and a graduate assistant. I don’t know why. They never really said much. A lot of them ended up getting better jobs at higher levels. That’s just kind of how it goes, but it was kind of crazy how it went. They had been coaching here for a while, and after going 1 and 10, everybody’s going to be looking for another job. And then, a couple of weeks into our winter workouts, our head coach ended up leaving too.”
At that point, a new coaching staff who led the football team during Holt’s junior year was hired.
“It was pretty crazy because it was kind of like starting from scratch,” he said. “We learned a whole new defense and a whole new style of coaching. It was really different. I started all the way up until the third or fourth game, and then I ended up getting a sprain and contusion on my hand. I was out for a little bit because it took me a while to fully heal from it. Then I came back, and we went 1 and 10 last year. Coming back this year, a lot of the guys transferred or quit playing.
“I think we had the youngest team probably in America. There were a lot of freshmen and sophomores. At that point, I knew I was stuck in a rebuild, so I kept playing — kind of finishing out and learning as much as I could of the game before I ended up starting to coach. I learned way more than I ever thought I would. It took me a whole year to adjust to the new defense, but then, when I came back this year, I had a pretty good understanding of it and ended up having my best season — even though it didn’t feel like that, because we went 1 and 10 again this year.”
Now that Holt — a physical education major — has only one more semester to go before graduation, he plans to student teach at the local high school and finish one last online class before he sets his sights on his vocational goal.
“My main goal is to get as versed as possible from the teaching I’m doing, Holt said. “The first eight weeks of the semester, I’m teaching two health classes, and then the rest of the day, I’m in the weight room. At midterm, I’m switching over to doing elementary PE. I know, especially in teaching, you’re not going to start off exactly where you want to be, so I might as well know everything and be able to do it all. I want to move back home, find a place and coach some football and maybe some other sports if they need me to.
“The first thing I did right away, once I got started in student teaching and got settled into my group, I started reaching out to people just to learn as much about football as possible. The first person I texted was my defensive coordinator for the past two years. We talked on the phone a couple of weeks ago for probably an hour or an hour-and-a-half. I said, ‘Tell me what it is to be a defensive coordinator,’ and jotted down what he said as I let him talk. I picked his brain on everything I could.”
Holt said he’s noticed through the years that the southeast portion of the state is underrecruited in all sports despite having many good athletes.
“We’re just not big enough or not well known enough,” he said. “Of course, everybody knows about Jackson, but other than Jackson, nobody knows any small schools. You take Saxony, for example. You take St. Vincent, Ste. Gen — I just feel like the whole area is underrecruited. There’s a lot of talent that’s getting underrecruited. I want to get everybody as well-known as possible because there’s a lot of good athletes in the area."
