Despite a name that conjures images of a dusty, one-stoplight town that has no business mass-producing football stars, Rock Hill is actually a growing city of 70,000 — one of the largest in South Carolina — about 20 miles south of Charlotte, N.C., and right off the interstate highway that links that city with South Carolina’s capital, Columbia.

And its track record of professional-quality football has helped produce a virtuous cycle of talented players.

“The continuing success we’ve been able to have means the expectations are there, the standards are there,” said Doug Echols, Rock Hill’s mayor since 1998, whose first job in town, in the 1970s, was as Northwestern’s football coach. “That spills over into quality coaching, kids’ interest, district support, community support.”

But Rock Hill also reflects the shift in high school football’s national center of gravity to the South over the past several decades. Over five recent national recruiting classes, according to SB Nation, the greatest number of top recruits were produced not only by extremely populous and sunny states like Florida, Texas and California — the three leaders, in that order — but also by the Southern football factories Georgia (fourth), Louisiana (sixth), Alabama (seventh), Virginia (eighth), North Carolina (ninth) and Tennessee (tenth).

The N.F.L. draft numbers are even more stark: Seven of the 10 states with the most picks per million people were in the South. South Carolina was No. 1.