Reporting on high school football was among the last things my classmates and I had anticipated when we enrolled in an audio-journalism course last fall. But in October, during Princeton’s fall break, the 10 of us sat huddled on the cold metal bleachers of John F. Kennedy High School in Mound Bayou, Miss., waiting for the evening’s game to kick off.

We had expected the class to focus on the civil rights era. We quickly discovered that Mound Bayou was full of stories that stretched far beyond its history.