After leading the Bullock County football team on a historic playoff run, Jeremy Vines is leaving to take the Hueytown job.

Vines announced the move on social media Thursday.

“I am excited for the next chapter and challenge ahead,” he said.

Vines led the Hornets to a 9-4 record and the first two playoff wins in school history. His team beat Oak Grove 21-7 and Mobile Christian 21-0 in the Class 4A playoffs before losing at No. 1 St. Michael in the quarterfinals.

Bullock County had never won a playoff game and only been in the postseason twice before this past season.

“When I arrived at Bullock County, my goal was simple: to leave the program better than it was when I found it,” he said. “Together, we did that.”

Vines was 18-16 in three seasons as the Hornets’ head coach. The Alabama Sports Writers Association named him the Class 4A coach of the season for 2025.

He will replace veteran coach Greg Patterson at Hueytown. Patterson stepped down earlier this month after seven years at the school. The Gophers made the playoffs in each season and reached the 6A championship game in 2021.

This is a guest opinion column

Alabama parents are right to be alarmed about what their children encounter online.

Anxiety, exploitation, compulsive spending, and exposure to adult strangers are documented realities with life-altering consequences. And, unfortunately, these harms are no accident – they’re the deliberate product of an online world designed to profit from kids’ innocence and parents’ unfamiliarity.

Luckily, the Alabama House, led by Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter and Representative Chris Sells, is taking real steps to protect kids online. Last week, the Alabama House opened the 2026 legislative session with a unanimous committee vote to advance House Bill 161, the App Store Accountability Act, a child safety bill supported by more than 170 child advocacy organizations across the country, including Heritage and Moms for Liberty.

House Bill 161 will finally give parents a fighting chance at protecting their kids from bad actors online by establishing clear, enforceable, and parent-centered guardrails that apply equally across the digital ecosystem – no carveouts, no exceptions. Under the bill, app stores would be required to securely verify users’ age and, for underage users, require app stores to get parental approval before children can download apps or make in-app purchases.

In order to ensure parents can make confident decisions of which apps they allow their kids to download, House Bill 161 will also require accurate, transparent age-rating information parents need to make a well-informed choice about whether a platform is appropriate.

These protections are simple but effective. They work within app stores’ secure infrastructure and protect free speech by targeting app stores’ contracting practices – not individual apps’ content.

Most importantly, House Bill 161 is a solution that most Alabama parents actually want. According to a poll by the Alabama Policy Institute, 83 percent of Alabama parents and voters support requiring app stores to get parental approval before children can download apps – one of the key components of House Bill 161. With strong, bipartisan support, House Bill 161 is commonsense legislation that will immediately help Alabama parents.

Apple and Google’s app stores form the gateways to all kinds of online risks. They distribute sexualized AI chatbots, dating and hookup apps, and even apps that appear harmless on the surface, such as rogue Bible or weather apps, that investigations have shown offer children backdoors to obscene content. In the process, they make no distinction between vulnerable youth and consenting adults, brokering contracts between minor users and developers that any judge would deem unenforceable.

App stores aggressively promote risky platforms to underage users under labels like “Must-Have Apps” displayed in prominent locations. Plus, recent Federal Trade Commission complaints outline how app stores often know when a user is a child, and yet fail to share that information with app developers, causing apps to default to adult settings that subject children to exact location tracking, contact from strangers, and even more of their personal data. This is why House Bill 161 is desperately needed – to put parents back in charge.

Unsurprisingly, rather than investing time in improving their products for families and children, the tech industry has chosen to instead introduce their own, misleading bill that does nothing to actually empower parents or protect kids. Big Tech’s alternative bill, House Bill 219, is a distraction and stall tactic lacking the accountability mechanisms that make House Bill 161 (the App Store Accountability Act) the most effective solution.

House Bill 219 attempts to replace House Bill 161’s secure age verification and verifiable parental consent with self-declared age and opt-in age signaling, allowing kids to lie about their age while app stores turn a blind eye.

App stores are not bystanders; they are powerful enablers. As the gatekeepers of the online world, they decide when an app can be downloaded, what information parents see, whether a child is treated as a minor or an adult, and how easily money and data flow out of a family’s home.

Alabama families are asking for clearer rules, real transparency, and a fair chance to protect their children before harm occurs, not after. House Bill 161 does exactly that – empowering parents with real authority at the point of access and offering the strongest, most effective solution to keep Alabama’s children safe online. It is time for the Alabama House and Senate to pass House Bill 161, the App Store Accountability Act.

Melea Stephens is a practicing marriage and family therapist in Alabama and a board member of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

A Florida man is under arrest after police say he was stopped on an Alabama roadway with 81 gallons of moonshine.

Learndis Hamilton, a 61-year-old from Polk County, Fl., is charged with possession of more than five gallons of alcohol without a license, which is a felony.

Ozark police Officer Dylan Griffin, who is with the department’s Crime Suppression Unit, stopped Hamilton for a traffic violation on Jan. 9, police announced Wednesday.

Officers found Hamilton with multiple containers in his vehicle that police determined to be illegally distilled moonshine in plain sight.

Hamilton was booked into the Dale County Jail Jan. 10 with bond set at $50,000. He was released the same day.

The case was turned over to the Alabama Beverage Control Board for further investigation.

The case is set to be presented to a grand jury in March.

“Had it not been for the diligence and proactive enforcement of Officer Griffin, the prohibited liquor would have likely been sold with zero oversight or regulation,” police said in a Jan. 21 statement, “possibly leading to additional crimes.”