Walton linebacker Miles Freberg's mother, Madeline Freberg, buys 20 bananas every Tuesday so they can be ripe on Friday in time for Walton's pre-game meal that afternoon.

She starts her Fridays by cooking enough homemade banana pudding to accommodate 75 players and coaches every week prior to game time.

Walton's pre-game meals vary every week. Some weeks it's chicken. Other weeks, it's pasta. But Freberg's banana pudding has been the only constant, and it has been a constant for three years. Now that Walton is on an 11-game winning streak this season going into the Class AAAAA state quarterfinals against M.L. King, she's now buying 30 bananas. It seems to be a lucky charm.

"I love doing it. I can probably make banana pudding in my sleep," Freberg said. "We've been cooking pre game meals for, gosh, a number of years. It's a fun tradition."

Besides Freberg's banana pudding, not a lot of lucky traditions were discussed between the coaches and players during the course of their winning streak this season.

Head coach Ed Dudley wears the same shirt every week - that's about it. Defensive end Chase Thomas wears the same T-Shirt beneath his pads but said he didn't know what other players did. Receiver Billy Burns said he's not superstitious - he just focuses every Friday night on his responsibilities.

Most of the superstition comes from students and community members that either work Walton games or watches them. Athletic secretary Lisa Sager, who hasn't missed a Walton football game in eight seasons, had stories to tell about what people do for good luck.

Sager said a group of nine bare-chested Walton students have the same Walton cheerleaders paint the letters to spell out "GO RAIDERS" on them before every game and they assemble in a quiet room nearby before every game just to get loud and psyched up before joining the crowd at kickoff.

And Sager has more to tell.

Bill Perry, who designs Walton's Web site, has worn the same 1997 Walton T-Shirt every game Walton has won -it's the first free T-Shirt he got from Dudley. Booster club president Dan Collins wore his Walton cap when the Raiders lost their season opener to North Gwinnett and hasn't worn it since.

And the press box menu has stayed the same all season - barbecue pork sandwiches, Brunswick stew, cheesy potatoes and homemade peach cobbler.

"They've just embraced it. It's really nice," Sager said about the community around the east Cobb school. "We have the support and the sponsors. We were selling tickets Thanksgiving morning (for Walton's 37-28 win over Harrison at Raider Valley) and people came out to buy. We opened the ticket booth from 9 to 10:30 a.m. and there was a line when I got there at 8:45."

When it came down to business on the field, the first thing Walton had to do to start its 11-game winning streak was halt a two-year streak of starting seasons at 1-4. The Raiders did that by surviving Kennesaw Mountain in the second game of the season, 15-14.

"I definitely think it helped our confidence," Dudley said of that first win. "We tried to run the ball at them and were unsuccessful doing that so we threw the ball well in the fourth to win the game. It definitely helped. We started with our usually 0-1 start."

Walton's next big test was beating defending co-state champion Roswell, 13-10, two weeks later. With the Raiders having won every game by eight points or more every since, Freberg may want to consider buying an extra few bushels of bananas if Walton makes it all the way to the Class AAAAA state finals.

acarrington@mdjonline.com

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