Floyd Carter, who is about to graduate from Carbon Hill High School, took the reporter to an area of the school with photos of successful school sports teams on the wall, swelling with school pride.
“I want to fill this area,” he said, referring to more photos of championship teams.
Carter, 17, is an impassioned, smiling youth. Even with the pandemic, has found himself busy at school and at a job at Subway, helping himself and his family in the process. He noted he usually doesn’t even have time for himself in the day until about 8 p.m.
But if there is anything else he can make time for, it is Carbon Hill and its school. He loves his high school and his community.
Carter was born on Aug. 23, 2003, in Yonkers, New York – the family came here when he was about 3 – but that Carbon Hill is where he loves to be.
“He’s full of pride and works hard,” said Carbon Hill High School Principal Kyle Dutton, noting staff and students can always depend on him. “He has goals and he’s worked hard to reach them. I’m super proud of him. He works, but he is at all of our events. He bleeds blue and white. He’s bulldog through and through.”
“You know, I love Carbon Hill,” Carter said. “I know Yonkers was where I was born at, but I really think this is my hometown. I just want to see this town grow and get it to back to where it was.”
The family is also from the New York area, he said. His mother is Victoria Carter and his grandmother is Gertrude Carter. He noted he came with them when he was in Head Start, and the three remain in the city, not far from the school complex.
“I just try to do everything I can do around the house,” he said. Carter works after school at Subway, which he said also sometimes helps out to pay the bills at home.
He describes his relationship with his mother and grandmother as being close. Asked what they have done for him, he said, “Everything, honestly. They gave me life, and that’s all I can ever ask for.”
Carter has been in the Carbon Hill band program for about six years, he said, starting around fifth- or sixth-grade.
“That is what I am going to college for, to be a music education teacher and come back here and be a band director,” he said, noting he loves the passion in the local band program. He “falls in love with music” as a natural stress reliever.
“You can make like harmonies and stuff all by yourself, and you publish it and people just fall it love with it. You can actually make a job or career out of it, and it just astonishes me,” he said. “I always knew I wanted to be in the music industry.”
Even as a child he tried to progress, working out or learning a new skill.
“I love seeing that in others, too, working with them, training them or teaching them,” he said. “Seeing me progress or seeing someone else progress, I just love it. So I put two and two together, and said, ‘Why don’t I just become a band director or music teacher?'”
His interest in music spans to all types. Within the same breath, he notes is just at home with Mozart and Beethoven as he is with pop stars. “I love Bruno Mars and Panic! At The Disco,” he said. “All the main street rappers you see – I just love all of that.”
At the same time, asked about Mozart and Beethoven, he likes their movements, and how their chords and harmonies come together – “the crescendos and the music, and just how you can paint an image in your mind of it.”
He is a percussion captain, with the snare being his main instrument. He also plays the tenors (another set of drums), tuba, saxophone and trombone, with the saxophone his main secondary instrument.
“I love drums,” he said. “My grandpa, before he passed, he was in the drum and bugle corp. One of them was the Cavaliers. I always wanted, after high school, to join the drum and bugle corp and be a marching Cavalier.”
He is a huge sports fan, and noted basketball just wrapped up. He served as a manager and coach Garrett Kirkland awarded him a jersey for working so hard. In the end, he also got some playing time one night.
“It was a blessing,” he said, moved that Kirkland would treat him as well. “It was like a dream. It was like a story actually. I’ve been working so hard. I’ve been telling everybody, ‘I’m going to make the team.’ I’m so passionate about everything. I just believe if you have a passion, you are going to work for it. That’s how I’ve been about band and basketball. I had a passion about basketball and I worked on it every single day. The players on the team had my back. Everybody else would just look at me and go like, ‘Really, you’re going to be an athlete?'”
On Senior Night on Feb. 4, everyone was dressing out, and one of the players asked him, “So Floyd, when are you going to put on a uniform?” At their urging – saying Kirkland wouldn’t mind – he put the uniform on.
When he passed Kirkland, he said, “Man, that looks good on you. Are you going to stick to it?”
“I almost broke down into tears. I never thought he would let me wear it,” Carter said.
Carter came off the bench for a basket in the closing seconds of the game, in a 59-51 victory over Curry.
He said he is doing alright academically as an average student, although he noted the pandemic and his job have added pressures.
“I had a choice of being virtual (at school) but I know I could never work unless I am in an environment that forces me to, so I’ve been in school the whole year long. I think I’m doing pretty good,” he said. Carter really loves math as a subject, noting if band were not to work out, he could get a degree in mathematics.
He got scholarships from Wallace State Community College in Hanceville and the University of North Alabama (UNA) in Florence, although he wasn’t sure if he wanted the latter because of financial reasons. He still may go to UNA after he takes two years at Wallace.
At Wallace State he also auditioned for band. “I got the most money you can get from a music program there, so it was basically a full ride,” he said.
He goes to First Baptist Church in Carbon Hill, but his attendance is off these days due to work. Currently he also goes to work at Subway, where he sees many classmates.
“I can probably tell you everybody in this school’s name,” Carter said. “I think everybody in the school is special in their own way.” Moreover, he cares about them as well. He says people tell him he has a special gift for being able to attract others to him, giving off a positive vibe. “I don’t really know,” he said.
But as for Carbon Hill, he is clear on his desire to wanting Carbon Hill succeed, winning state championships for all sports, even the smallest, and becoming the best Walker County school.
Carter said that he is tired of other schools getting ahead of his school. “It’s like Carbon Hill’s time,” he said, pointing out in recent times how the basketball team made the Sweet 16 and how football and baseball advanced to playoffs.
“It’s like we’ve finally got the stepping stone to a winning program,” he said. “What I want to do, when I come back here, is have the band program like that – a dynasty and just like a winning program.
“Ultimately, my goal is to have like a little atmosphere” around not just the band but all the athletics and academic, instilling “that you matter, and that what you do matters,” Carter said. “Participation matters. You have no idea how much it does to the school, but also for you.”
Asked what is overlooked in helping a band student, Carter noted there is a stereotype that band students are “weirdos.” He feels popular students can attract others to a band program, demonstrating that the program can be fun.
He said one faces adversity in life that one just has to fight through.
“You also have failures in life – but you don’t think of the failures as failures. You think of it as a key to success,” he said. “That’s how sports is a lot of times. You win and you lose. But the attitude you have directs towards the next game. That’s why I want to have an atmosphere around that. We’ve been lacking that in some of the years – not trying to tear down the school. But when I come back, I want to set that for everything.”
Carter was asked what it means to graduate and leave Carbon Hill at this point, after being with the school for so long. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it bittersweet for him. After years of visualizing his senior year, it all changed with the virus.
“I just wanted another year where I could just have what I wanted, to have that back,” he said. “But, you know, you can never look back at stuff, I’ve learned. But it is just so sad for me to go, because I know the next step is college and it is going to be way different, and I’m going to have a lot more responsibilities. I just hope the next position I see here is as a teacher or a faculty member, but it won’t feel the same, having that student feeling, that vibe.”
