Welcome back to football season!

Not that we really don’t ever “leave” football season (how many negatives was that inside a sentence structure?), but now we have games that matter for the next few months to determine who gets to be a state champ in mid-December.

This is one part of the schedule that’s particularly fun for me. I know it’s not fun for athletic directors and coaches (sometimes, that’s the same person) as they try to figure out who they’re going to play before region play kicks in and the real sprint to the playoffs starts...

But we do get some nice regional matchups (see next week’s column when we talk about HoCo and Perry; they've now, officially, been warned), some nice matchups that cross state lines (Buford, Colquitt, and Lowndes please stand up), and we also get some that are locked into county rivalries where you better buy your tickets early, you better buy your food earlier, and you may need to reserve an afternoon to get a good parking place...

Kinda like “The Battle of Barrow...” between Apalachee and Winder-Barrow.

“The Battle of Barrow is just a classic high school rivalry. The schools are basically the same size. They go back and forth in classification. Winder-Barrow is the traditional school in town where a lot of people have gone and now Apalachee is the new kid on the block.”

That’s former D-O-Double G’s head coach Ed Dudley. He got to be a part of this one first-hand and is now getting to watch it from the sidelines at Blessed Trinity. 

“It's always the huge rivalry,” Dudley said. “I tell you, it's a pretty clean rivalry. And you get a big crowd. It's a great way to start the season and I was so proud of my Double-G Bulldoggs for pulling off for big win at the ‘Chee’ the other night.”

We’ll get to the game and its aftereffects in a bit...

Dudley went 4-1 in his head-to-head matchups against Apalachee, losing only the first time he faced them back in 2018, and the Bulldoggs have won 13 of the 20 all-time. But Apalachee was packed as the 2023 season kicked off. And I was being completely serious about how jammed the building was ... but it took a LOT of planning.

“Honestly, we started last Friday getting ready for something like this,” Apalachee AD Ralph Neeley admits in the 45 seconds I could get him to answer questions. He was a scene of constant motion ... so much motion, in fact, that he left his ID behind after doing the interview that will air on the TV side of GPB in a few weeks.

“Lining up security, lining up gate workers, getting the stadium ready to play in, checking all the scoreboards for power, and making sure all the lights work. All this for Senior Night, too. We had 19 seniors and about 30 corporate sponsors as well here. There’s all those small details to make sure a night like this goes off without a hitch for 365 days of bragging rights.”

Did I mention that the game this year had two first-year head coaches?

 

The home side had an associate head coach/defensive coordinator in Mike Hancock get the promotion for 2023 -- his first-ever head coaching gig after a quarter-century of work to date. Hancock’s CV includes time in Loganville, Chestatee, Monroe Area and Walnut Grove. He got to pick the brains of guys like Tommy Stringer, Matt Fligg, Kevin Reach (his old roommate, by the way), Tony Lotti and Ben Reaves. And Robert Paxia moved back north for the job at Winder-Barrow after coaching at Flagler-Palm Coast after time as an assistant at Villa Rica and Plant City, Fla.  

(Get all that? There will be a quiz later on.)

“I have applied for a lot of head coaching jobs, but I also know in my life it’s all in God’s timing,” Hancock tells me. “So, this is what He had planned for me as a 26-year veteran coach. It definitely is a lot different and I know what other head coaches have gone through. Your phone and emails blow up.”

Hancock gives me a laugh in what sounds like a bit of an undersell.

“It has been an adjustment with my wife as well,” he says. Coach Hancock also admits it is an adjustment trying to figure out the whole thing about putting your phone down and picking it up when someone calls.

Like when a TV guy calls before practice to get some questions answered about a rivalry game for a debut -- but the time with all those head coaches mentioned above has prepped him for this time in his career.

“I got to pull something different from each of them,” he says. “I was a 24-year-old kid learning from Coach Stringer and it was a blessing to be with all of them all this time. Even if it wasn’t a winning season, there was always something you could take from that year. I got to put my stamp on things at the same time.

“Coach Stringer had a quote, ‘There’s more to coaching than just stepping onto the field.’ And that’s the truth. You learn to balance things in your life as a coach as best you can and how to deal with things as they come along.” 

That includes the new snack shack at the stadium that the booster club was building and staying late to make sure everything was going well in all other aspects for a debut -- on the field and in the Apalachee community. Coach Hancock also had meetings at the local Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce before this game to put into the calendar.  

When you catch up with Coach Paxia over at Winder-Barrow, he kept coming back to one word that attracted him to a 458-mile move with his family.

“When I looked into coming to Winder, you know the No. 1 thing people talking about was community ... that, and support. And you know, I can't talk enough about those things and we just really appreciate as a family of the support that they give.”

Nothing like a rivalry game to be your first one out of the blocks, though, right?

“What I told the kids is this: This is what you're preparing for -- the atmosphere and we're preparing for what is in the future. And we fully expect to try to make a (playoff) run and to do those things. And tonight, is just the first one for us. We worked really, really hard. The kids worked really hard with weights, and they work hard at practice. So, we’re just trying to continue to get better and I know that early on.” 

In the game itself, Apalachee got the first score on the board with a 70-yard pitch-and-catch and Winder-Barrow would equalize before holding the home team to a zero in the second half on the way to a 28-7 road win. And I saw something I don’t think I have ever seen before in a game.

Winder-Barrow completes a pass to get to what we all thought was a first-and-goal at the 4. 

Not so fast. Five accepted penalties later created a second-and-goal at the Apalachee 45. There would be another penalty that was declined that would have back the ball up into Winder-Barrow territory so the backing-up stopped there for a third-down call.

At the 45.

“We're young, especially on offense, and we kind of let the environment get to us a little bit at the beginning. And I mean we had a ton of yards. We just couldn't put these points on the board. I mean, I've never had a third-and-goal from the 45,” Paxia admits. “So, you know, it's just about not making these mistakes and trying to do a good job, get better and we have some stuff we can learn and grow from.”

As Hancock gets his team ready for their next game at Central Gwinnett, I asked him about what he’ll remember about his first-ever head coaching game. He went back to family.

“I got to share it with my wife and three kids,” he says. “I’ve been married for over 20 years. My dad was there, as was my stepmom, and my sister. I lost my mom last football season, but I got to share it with them. And I know my mom would have called me Saturday morning -- win or lose. I also got to share it with Jordan Rushing, who’s now the offensive coordinator with me here with his promotion. We go back to our time at Walnut Grove.”

So, it’s about family in its various forms on the field, in the stands, and on your phone without question.

A rivalry takes on more chapters and so does a career for two coaches in the middle of it all.

I also heard that there is supposed to be a friendly pie in the face among county commissioners at the winning team’s practice. If the video surfaces on that, I’ll let you know...

On to game two, or one... and we’re all off and running...

Play it safe, everyone... I’ll talk to you soon...