VALDOSTA — Author Drew Jubera was given a behind the scenes look at the Valdosta High School football program during the 2010 season. He received far more access than any normal media member or fan has ever been granted. He was given full-access to the Wildcat program.

Now, he is preparing to share his experiences chronicling the team during his all-access season with the general public. His book, “Must Win,” is set to be released Sept. 4, just three days after the 2012 Wildcats open their season.

The book will provide a complete, detailed behind the scenes look at the 2010 Valdosta High football team and how then-first-year head coach Rance Gillespie turned the Wildcat program around from a struggling 7-4 season in 2009, which included a 57-15 loss to crosstown rival Lowndes, into an 11-2 bounce-back season in 2010.

Jubera, a former writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 20 years, was with the Wildcats from the start of spring practice to the start of summer camp to closed-door coaches’ meetings throughout the season to pre-game meals and speeches, to halftime adjustments to postgame celebrations and defeats. Jubera was there for it all, chronicling the team and the season that may have saved Valdosta Wildcat football.

“I started coming down to Valdosta for spring practice,” Jubera said. “I was there the first day of camp, I was at camp, I was there throughout the season. It started out several times a week, commuting back-and-forth, and then I kind of embedded in and was there for weeks at a time, often, especially later in the season.

“I was there for practices every day. I was in Coach Gillespie’s office, constantly. I traveled with the team. At halftime, I was in the coaches’ office with them.”

On the cover of the book, “Must Win” features a picture of the 2010 Wildcat team running out of the end zone at Cleveland Field at Bazemore-Hyder Stadium. At the top of the cover is a review from New York Times bestseller Joe Drape, who describes the book as “The inspiring story of how a coach with a grand vision and even bigger heart plucked his players out of jail and off the farm and made them believe they were champions.”

“When Gillespie arrived, that program was in pretty bad shape,” Jubera explained. “And the first thing he had to do was get a bunch of kids eligible to play. He had players that had been in jail, and he was dealing with that. He had no starting quarterback, really, and he ended up talking with Ryan Whilden, who ended up being his starting quarterback. And Ryan is the son of a bee keeper, and really kind of a country kid. There were just really different kinds of kids with different backgrounds and different challenges that (Gillespie) had to put together to turn into a team.”

The cover also describes the book as “A season of survival for a town and its football team,” something Jubera said he tried to chronicle throughout his book.

“That season was pivotal to whether Valdosta was going to have a chance to come back or not,” said Jubera of the 2010 season. “If that season would have gone south, who knows what would have happened to the program.”

The 304-page “Must Win” is the first known book that follows the Valdosta program for a single season.

The program had one notable opportunity to get similar coverage in 1988, when H.G. Bissinger approached then-head coach Nick Hyder about the possibility of having a book written about the Wildcats’ season.

Hyder and Valdosta declined, and Bissinger ended up following the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas during the ’88 season. The book “Friday Night Lights” chronicled the Panthers’ season. The book was later made into the hit 2004 movie “Friday Night Lights,” and later into a popular television series.

Jubera’s journey to writing the book began in 2009 when he wrote an article for The New York Times on the state of the nation’s all-time winningest high school football program. The connections he made while writing that story led him to return to Valdosta in 2010 to meet the then-newly hired Gillespie. During that meeting with Gillespie is when Jubera asked for permission to write the book and chronicle the team for the 2010 season.

“I had come down (to Valdosta) in 2009 to write a story for The New York Times. It was about a week after they lost to Lowndes, (Rick) Tomberlin was fired a few days after, and if you live in Georgia, you know about Valdosta,” Jubera said.

 “I had seen this was the third coach fired or left the program in the past seven years, so I pitched the story to The New York Times, and the thing that got me, you arrive at a situation like that, where the program has hit bottom, and people were willing to talk to me about it. ... And a few months later, someone called me and told me they had hired a new coach, so I talked to Coach Gillespie and I asked him if I could embed myself in his program for a year, and he said, ‘Sure.’ It showed me the confidence he had in himself.”

Once Jubera began his project of writing the book, he spent much of his time with Gillespie and his wife, Claudette. The time spent with Gillespie made Jubera quickly learn what it took to run a program the caliber of Valdosta’s.

“I guess I learned, first of all, how much it takes to run that program, run that machine,” Jubera said. “The kind of dedication and passion it takes. I got that loyalty to the program. They want to be Wildcats. Those coaches really wanted to bring that program back to what it was.”

Along with the coaches, Jubera was able to focus on some of the high-profile names on the 2010 team, including Malcolm Mitchell, Jay Rome, Whilden and Reggie McQueen.

“Ultimately, I centered on a handful of characters,” Jubera said. “Coach Gillespie and his wife, Claudette, were two folks that were centered on all the time. And then a number of players: Malcolm Mitchell, Jay and (his father) Stan Rome, Ryan Whilden and Alex Stephenson, who were in a quarterback battle, Reggie McQueen, a starting defensive back that was almost out of football his sophomore year. And I followed boosters like David Waller, too.”

During his time with the program, Jubera was able to experience the Winnersville rivalry, something he didn’t fully understand until he experienced it first hand.

“Showing up at the game, everyone kept telling me, ‘You have to see that game,’” Jubera said. “It lived up to the hype in a lot of ways. It was a great game with a lot of great players. It really showcased the athleticism of South Georgia there on that one field.”

One thing Jubera focused on within the Winnersville rivalry was the question of whether Valdosta could ever dethrone its crosstown rival Vikings and return to prominence within the community.

“That was the question I had when I did the story for The (New York) Times in 2009, whether the Valdosta program really could come back,” Jubera said. “And there were people who thought it couldn’t, that the landscape had shifted too much. The demographics had changed, the population had shifted. Kids were growing up wanting to play football for Lowndes, and obviously Lowndes had built itself a great program over there.

“But it was clear that when Gillespie came in, that his goal was to not play second fiddle to that program any more. Their goal was to win that game and their goal, now, is to compete with that program.”

Gillespie and the Valdosta program accomplished that feat in 2011, beating the Vikings for the first time since 2003, something Jubera was able to experience in person, even though his year covering the team was over.

“The book begins with that game last year, when they won at Lowndes,” Jubera said. “I went over to Coach Gillespie’s house after that, a bunch of coaches came over and sat around in his front yard and it really felt like they obtained a goal they wanted. Obviously the next goal is to win a state championship, but as you know in that town, it was kind of the state championship of Valdosta.”

“What became clear to me is that Valdosta is back,” Jubera continued. “Whether it is back to the degree that people want it to be there, I don’t know. But they are clearly a team to be reckoned with, a program to be reckoned with now.”

Learning about the history of Winnersville, and the Valdosta program, was something Jubera was able to do as he progressed through the season. He said talking to people around town and those associated with the program helped him fully understand what the program was truly all about.

“I learned a lot on the fly, but I talked to a lot of folks,” Jubera said. “And they were willing to talk. I just talked to a lot of people and pieced it together when I was down there.”

Although it won’t be released until September, “Must Win” is available for pre-order at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.