October 1, 2026
The two most important new names on Weddington High School's undefeated football roster spent last fall trying to beat it. Quarterback Jared Street Jr. lined up for Independence in 2025, a Patriots team that went 10-3 and lost to Weddington in the third round of the state playoffs. Linebacker Eric Henriquez and defensive end Makai Henriquez wore the colors of Porter Ridge, a program Union County football watchers list as one of Weddington's sharper rivalries. All three are Warriors now. Six games into the 2026 season, Weddington is 6-0, ranked second in North Carolina, and hasn't trailed by more than a touchdown all year.
That last part matters more than the ranking. Weddington has outscored its six opponents 229 to 66, an average margin of roughly 27 points a game, and the wins have come everywhere: three at home, three on the road. There's no soft schedule explanation here and no home-field crutch. Myers Park fell 35-14 in Week 2. Monroe lost 31-7. Crest lost 35-21. Charlotte Catholic, a program good enough to get a WBTV Football Friday Night broadcast slot for the game, lost 37-7. Sun Valley was shut out 42-0 in Week 6.
Weddington has been good before. What it hasn't done is finish. The program has lost in the state semifinals two years running, both times to Grimsley, a result Union County football coverage has flatly called disappointing. A team can be talented and still walk away from October with nothing to show for it twice in a row, and that's exactly what happened here. So the current run isn't just a hot start. It's a program with a specific, recent memory of how close isn't the same as done, playing its way back toward the same round that beat it last year and the year before that.
The roster answers that memory in an unusual way. Rather than simply developing the same core group another year, Weddington reshaped its two most pressure-heavy positions with outside talent. Street Jr. completed 63 percent of his passes for 2,317 yards and 19 touchdowns at Independence last season, numbers that come with an odd footnote: the team he put those numbers up for still lost to the program he now quarterbacks. The Henriquez brothers arrive from a defense that Weddington had to prepare for as an opponent as recently as last year. Whatever scouting reports existed on either side, they now sit inside the same building.
That doesn't mean the identity of this team is imported. The returning core is doing plenty of the heavy lifting. Linebacker Rex Conlon, back after 35 tackles in 2025, anchors a defense that has allowed 66 points across six games. Senior defensive back Ace Clements, who racked up 44 tackles as a junior and earned All-Southern Carolina 6A/7A honors, has already committed to play college football at Marshall. Center Bryce Johnson, a four-year starter who made all-conference at the position last season, has committed to East Carolina. The unbeaten record is a blend: homegrown seniors who lived through the last two semifinal losses, playing next to newcomers who spent last October on the other sideline.
Weddington's schedule has been favorable in one specific sense. The team hasn't yet played anyone from its own conference with a matching record, until now. On October 2, the Warriors host Marvin Ridge, a program that opened its own season 4-0 with wins that ranged from comfortable to nerve-wracking: 77-13 over Cox Mill, 43-0 over Ballantyne Ridge, 42-21 over Ardrey Kell, and a 35-33 escape against Ashbrook that suggests this year's Mavericks, under head coach Aubrey Carter, can be pushed.
There's a quirk worth knowing if you've lived in Weddington long enough to assume the map matches the mascot. Marvin Ridge High School, despite the name, isn't in Marvin. It's a Waxhaw address, one of the small reminders of how fast Union County's school boundaries outran its town lines as the area grew. The rivalry is real regardless of which town technically claims the building. Weddington's junior varsity beat Marvin Ridge's JV 41-14 back in October 2025, a lopsided number that varsity fans on both sides have likely filed away for this year's rematch.
Kickoff is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Weddington High School, 4901 Monroe Weddington Road in Matthews. It's the kind of night this town treats as an event rather than a routine home game, and this year it carries an extra layer: a program trying to prove that six straight wins built partly from rival transfers can hold up against the one team on the schedule with a record that matches its own.
Sally Awad keeps an eye on the small details that make a place feel like home, right down to who's kicking off on a Friday night in Weddington. If you're weighing what life here actually looks like week to week, Sally Awad is glad to talk it through. Request a Private Luxury Consultation whenever the timing's right.
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