VALDOSTA — Players still bang their helmets against the corrugated metal roof of the walkway outside the locker room before rushing onto the field here, the collective rumble like a storm coming up from the Gulf. An end-zone billboard continues to welcome visitors to Death Valley, a bold declaration of trouble ahead.

Those are props from another era.

“When we walked onto the field, you could look at the other kids and see the fear,” said Berke Holtzclaw, the quarterback for Valdosta High School’s 1984 state championship team.

While traditions endure, fortunes have changed at Valdosta, home of 23 state championships. The team has been named a national champion six times by various organizations and, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, is the country’s all-time winningest high school football program with a record of 850-200-34.

But the Wildcats lost their third coach in seven years after the school decided not to renew his contract days after a 57-15 loss to neighboring Lowndes last month. Valdosta’s 11,000-seat stadium, once packed for nearly every kickoff, has been two-thirds empty some game nights, even after a $7 million facelift in 2004. Despite eight playoff appearances in this decade, including

this year, Valdosta has not won a championship since 1998.

That is unacceptable in this quaint town of 48,000 near the Florida border.

The scene here now unspools like “Friday Night Lights” at a crossroad. Politics, race, a shifting population, competing camps of influence, and boosters who raise $100,000 a year and dissect game film every Monday night with the coach all play a part.

“There’s a bad vibe going on,” said Buck Belue, an Atlanta sports radio host and former Wildcat, who quarterbacked the University of Georgia’s 1980 national championship team. “It’ll take a special guy to come in here and get into the politics: who’s sitting on the school board, whether there should be a black coach or a white coach. It’s become a lot more complicated.”

The biggest complication, many team supporters say, is that people have fled the city for the suburbs. Since 1990, Lowndes County has added almost 30,000 residents, swelling its population to 100,000.

That has left Valdosta High, which is about 75 percent black, with fewer than 1,800 students. This year enrollment fell below the cutoff for 5A football, Georgia’s highest classification, but the school plans to remain at that level.

Lowndes High, not far from the city limits, has 1,000 more students, is predominantly white and has won four state titles since 1999. A number of its current stars developed in Valdosta youth leagues, then moved out of the city.

“Most of our friends’ kids go to Lowndes even though we all went to Valdosta,” said Robert DeCesare, a restaurant owner whose youngest son plays for a Lowndes County middle school. “Valdosta went from all-white to almost all-black. It’s sad the way some people talk about it.”

Winning at Valdosta used to be automatic. The Boys Club and middle school teams ran the same plays as the high school team, so Valdosta freshmen arrived with virtually the whole playbook in their heads. The roster was so deep, the fight song had to be played twice while the players ran onto the field.

“Playing for Valdosta on Friday night was as big as the dream got,” Belue said.

Coach Wright Bazemore won 12 titles with all-white teams, beginning in 1947, then two more after the school was integrated in 1969. Bazemore retired after his 1971 team went undefeated and was named a national champion. His successor lasted only two seasons despite a 17-3 record.

A sermonizing Tennessean named Nick Hyder followed. His first team went 3-7, with the freshman Belue as its starting quarterback.

“We both had For Sale signs in our front yards on Saturday mornings,” Belue recalled.

Four years later, Hyder won the first of his seven state crowns. He nurtured Bazemore’s rugged pro-style system. Then in 1996 he had a heart attack in the school cafeteria and died. More than 8,000 viewed his coffin — in the school colors, black and gold — on the stadium’s 50-yard line.

A longtime assistant, Mike O’Brien, took over and won a state title in 1998. But four years later he was fired after compiling a 70-20-1 record. At the time, he attributed his dismissal to disagreements with powerful boosters.

Then a well-regarded coach from Florida arrived, and he replaced many of the routines and assistant coaches dating to Bazemore’s time. He lasted three seasons.

Rick Tomberlin, winner of three Georgia 2A titles, knew what he faced when he took over in 2006.

“The football I.Q. here is off the chart,” he said. “People come up to you and want to talk about a receiver’s footwork. They might not know who their state representative is, but they know the Lincoln score from 10 years ago.”

Tomberlin’s first team went 1-9 but made the playoffs the next season. The young Wildcats were 4-2 this year when Lowndes handed them the worst loss in team history. The superintendent told Tomberlin the following Tuesday that his almost $100,000 contract as coach and athletic director would not be renewed but that he could finish the season.

William Cason, the superintendent, said the Lowndes loss was not a “defining moment,” even though “I don’t like to lose that badly.”

The local paper editorialized against the midseason firing, and a poll favored giving Tomberlin more time. Holtzclaw, the former quarterback, said he sympathized with the coach, but added that he would have fired him at halftime of the Lowndes game.

“People felt the Valdosta mystique was tarnished,” said Tomberlin, whose team finished the season 7-4.

Race has become a more visible issue. When Valdosta High declined to show President Obama’s back-to-school speech live to students in September, some black leaders called for the resignation of Cason, who is white. A group of black parents and boosters have discussed forming their own search committee for a coach.

“I don’t think we need a black coach for the sake of a black coach,” said Stan Rome, who starred on Valdosta’s first integrated team, went on to play in the N.F.L. and is the father of a Wildcat player. “But we need to dispel the myth that there will never be a black coach at Valdosta. You’re still in the deep, deep South. A lot has changed, but there’s still a lot that hasn’t.”

Others wonder aloud whether Valdosta will ever regain its regional dominance and national prominence.

David Waller, 76, has missed four games since 1947. He is treasurer of the Touchdown Club and curator of the team’s 3,200-square-foot museum on the stadium grounds. Waller said he is the one who is blamed “every time a coach is fired.”

Nobody bleeds black and gold like Waller, who intends to be buried beside Hyder in a cemetery within earshot of the stadium’s roars. Yet even he knows the landscape has changed.

“We have to get used to the fact that times are different,” Waller said. “I don’t think it’ll ever be like it was. We can still work for it, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

When asked what he expected from the next coach, Waller did not hesitate to say, “State championships.”