This year, Seaforth High fielded a varsity football team for the first time. In their inaugural season of top-flight football, the Hawks finished 2-8 overall and 2-6 in conference play.
A quick look at the record can’t tell you the story of Seaforth’s whole season, though. The Hawks shook off an 0-3 start — where they were outscored by a total of 128-0 — to go 2-2 over the next four weeks, winning games against Jordan-Matthews and Chatham Central and suffering close, one-score losses to Northwood and Graham.
Head coach Terrance Gary’s team lost its final three games of the season, but Seaforth played the top three teams in its conference over those final three weeks. The combined record of the Hawks’ final three opponents — North Moore, Cummings and Bartlett Yancey — was 23-6 entering the state playoffs.
Gary spoke with the News + Record about his team’s first varsity season, while sharing his goals for the offseason and his expectations for next fall.
Terrance Gary: I think things went well for our first year on varsity. One of the things we worried about was injuries, which happen, because of our youth and size. We were also worried about kids just quitting. I don’t think we lost anyone on varsity (during the season), and on JV we only lost like four or five out of like 36 kids, which was good.
Really well. All of our guys have come around, and the biggest thing right now is going to be the offseason. Games are won in the winter and spring, and mainly the winter. We know everyone has to get bigger. And I’ve got to have some one-on-one meetings with some people. But they’ve laid the foundation, especially the guys that were here from the very first day. They set the standard with how we practiced, our effort and how we handled ourselves.
As a staff, we have to work on our tackling. I think it’s a problem around football anyway. Tackling is a lost art, but we still have to be better at it. We also want to implement more of a downhill running game. We have a lot of playmakers, it’s just about if we can get them the ball in some space so they can make plays. We just have to figure out how to do that. That’s going to be one of our emphases this offseason.
Oh, shoot. That’s dang near everybody. From the first game we played until the end of the season, their was some great improvement overall. I really can’t narrow it down to one person. Leadership-wise, (sophomore) Broden (Jones) has always been a leader for us. (Sophomore) Jackson Powell has been more vocal. (Sophomore) Walter Enterkin has also stepped up.
It’s really great, not having to worry about who’s graduating and all that. We can play a little bit differently than other people, just knowing that our guys are coming back. We added two kids after the second week of the season, and that helped us out a lot. And this is our first year playing football. Hopefully we can start convincing some other folks from other folks to come out and try playing for us, as well.
My goal, I told the guys before the season, was to beat all the teams in Chatham County. We came up just five points short. It’s going to raise the level of football in Chatham County, as well, Hopefully people will start to notice and put more investments in football around here. It’s such a small little area, and we only have four schools. We’re going to have to put in work, and (the other schools) are going to have to put in work, as well.
Maybe we could push for more funding or push to get more kids to participate. J-M started their own 14U program, and we have one, too, but we share it with Northwood. But it’s not really a whole Chatham County type thing. I need to get out to Moncure more to get more of those kids out here. I only had one kid on the football team this year from there, and he was a 9th grader. We just have to do better as a county to push football, if that’s what they really want to do.
Sports Editor Jeremy Vernon can be reached at jeremy@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @jbo_vernon.