Cottonwood High's football team has lost 26 straight games. First-year head coach Mike Ward is trying to rebuild a program gutted by transfers and coaching turnover.

The Colts are 0-7 this season with a combined score of 391-3, according to MaxPreps. They have not scored a touchdown in 2026. Their lone points came in a 48-3 loss to Juan Diego Catholic on Sept. 17.

Six of seven games ended before the fourth quarter under the UHSAA mercy rule, which stops play when a team trails by 44 or more points after three quarters.

Ward, a Norwich Free Academy (Connecticut) graduate who spent two years as an assistant at Granger, took over last winter as Cottonwood's third head coach in four seasons. Both predecessors resigned. When he held his first team meeting, 16 players showed up.

He and his staff recruited inside the school's hallways. They built the roster to 37 players. Only two had played football the previous season.

The offensive line features three freshmen, one sophomore and a junior who had never played the sport. The starting quarterback is a senior whose experience was in basketball and baseball.

"It took a lot of hard recruiting," Ward told the Deseret News. "Kids who never played or who were on the team last year who weren't considering playing. I spoke to them every chance I could."

Ward pointed to Utah's transfer culture as a root cause. He said in-boundary Cottonwood students are playing football at Murray, Hillcrest, Brighton and Olympus. Those rival programs have benefited while the Colts' talent pool shrank.

Cottonwood is a 4A school with roughly 1,400 students, yet it dressed only 25 players for the Sept. 25 homecoming game against Skyline because of injuries.

That game showed the gap. Skyline pulled its starters at the start of the second quarter, already leading 42-0, and won 56-0.

Cottonwood keeps a cannon behind the end zone to celebrate big plays. It fired twice that night: once for a fumble recovery, once for a first down.

The Colts haven't won since Oct. 11, 2024. The entire 2025 season was winless across nine games. Cottonwood played for the 5A state championship in 2004 and went 10-1 in 2010, its last winning season.

Alumni include fullback Stanley Havili, who went on to play for USC and three NFL teams, and quarterback Cooper Bateman, who signed with Alabama.

Ward, who grew up in the New York-Connecticut area in a military family, has tried to anchor the program in community. He organized a first responders vs. Cottonwood alumni football game at the school's stadium on Sept. 10, the Holladay Journal reported. The game fell the night before the Colts hosted Murray and honored the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cottonwood sits in last place in 4A Region 10 at 0-4. Three games remain: at Jordan on Friday, Oct. 2, home against Dixie on Friday, Oct. 9, and home against East on Wednesday, Oct. 14.