Bulldogs open Tierce era on the road

Published 8:45 am Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Just three months ago, the GMC Prep and Atkinson County boys soccer teams met to decide a state championship, which GMC won 4-1.

Now the schools are getting ready to do battle in American football as the Bulldogs and Rebels are set to square off in south Georgia Friday night at 7:30. It’ll be the opener for both teams and everyone else around the state as the 2024 high school football regular season kicks off.

Friday also marks the regular season debut for Gavin Tierce as head coach of the ‘Dogs. The 24-year-old northwest Georgia native was GMC Prep’s offensive line coach last season, but was elevated to the head role following the departure of Bobby Rhoades, who was at the helm just one season.

Tierce has now gotten a look at his first team twice during preseason scrimmages. The Bulldogs first went to Montgomery County a couple of weeks ago then hosted Macon private school Stratford Academy last Friday. During the home scrimmage, Stratford scored touchdowns on five out of six first-half possessions while the GMC Prep offense racked up three-and-outs.

“We’ve obviously got to get better,” Tierce said. “There were bright spots in both games, and a lot of low-lights in both games. I felt like we were prepared, now it’s just a matter of execution. We’ve got a lot of young kids and a lot of inexperienced football players. That’s what you see watching the film. All of that stuff can be fixed with time and reps in actual games.”

Despite the results looking similar to last year’s 3-7 effort, Tierce believes things are different in 2024.

“It’s a totally different vibe from last year,” he said. “When the going got tough last year, I felt like we all just fell apart. We’ve been unsuccessful in both scrimmages on both sides of the ball this year, but the kids have not shown an ounce of quit.”

The head coach hopes to see that attitude continue this week as the wins and losses now count.

A long road trip, the longest of the season for GMC Prep, is on the agenda for Friday. The Bulldogs will ride three hours by bus down 441 to the Atkinson County community of Pearson, located between Tifton and Waycross. The AtCo football team isn’t as accomplished as the school’s soccer squad as the Rebels have not won a game since the middle of the 2022 season. That’s 15 losses in a row, and in none of their games last year did they score more than 22 points. Atkinson County also has not posted a winning campaign since 2001. The closest they have come in recent years was a 5-5 mark in 2020.

It’ll be a showdown of old school offenses when the Bulldogs and Rebels meet. Tierce has converted GMC Prep to the wing T while AtCo will line up in the traditional I-formation and throw more than 80% of the time according to game film.

“They are going to run right at us,” said Tierce. “They’re not hiding what they’re doing. They’re going to give the ball to their best players and make you stop them. That’s their brand of football. It’s going to be a big test for us. We’ve got to gang-tackle because they’ve got two good running backs that look like they’re going to be hard to bring down one-on-one.”

Defensively, Atkinson is running a look similar to some GMC Prep saw in the preseason, so Tierce is hoping his offense can take that experience and apply it later this week.

There was a lot of shakeup in the Georgia High School Association during reclassification and realignment with the creation of a new state playoff specifically for private school members who will also compete in regions with public schools during the regular season. The split created a need for a postseason seeding formula in some classifications, but not the lowest where GMC Prep and AtCo compete. That means the top four teams in each region, as determined by records in region play, still earn a playoff berth in Class A Division 2. While Friday won’t be a region contest, it could have playoff implications down the road. GMC’s region in recent years has employed records versus in-classification, non-region opponents as one of the tiebreakers to determine seeding, so the outcome could have a say in whether or not the Bulldogs make the playoffs in Tierce’s first year as head.