The stage is set for Friday night’s scrimmage for Habersham Central High School as the Raiders will host Oconee County High School at 7:30 p.m. in Mt. Airy.
The scrimmage will act as a dress rehearsal for the 2024 season, which will officially kick off two weeks later on August 16 against rival Stephens County High School at The Reservation in Toccoa.
The scrimmage will allow Head Coach Benji Harrison and his staff to do a lot of things to prepare for that official kick off down the mountain.
First, the staff will know whether or not the players expected to step up can man those spots. Second, the scrimmage will be a clear indicator of whether questions left behind by departing seniors in the class of 2024 are answered by those donning the orange and blue this season. Third, the identity of this specific team that has been developed since the start of spring camp will largely be confirmed or taken back to the drawing board as the team gears up for the Indians.
The Warriors made it to the second round of the playoffs last season where they fell in a double-overtime matchup against a very good Lumpkin County High School squad in a 45-42 final.
Finishing the season 5-7 overall and 3-2 in Region 8-AAA earned Oconee County the No. 2 seed for the state playoffs a year ago.
The 2023-24 squad was bolstered by a sophomore, now-junior, running back named Caiden Wood. Wood finished that double-OT loss to Lumpkin County with 33 carries for 324 yards and five touchdowns on the ground. On the season, Wood carried the ball 187 times for 950 yards and 17 touchdowns with three 100-plus yard games.
As a team, the Warriors threw the ball 182 times for nine touchdowns. Wood caught 18 of those passes for 369 yards and five of the nine touchdowns.
“I wanted to play somebody that was physical,” Harrison said. “You’ve got Stephens coming in two weeks, so you need to play somebody similar. That’s what we’re doing.”
Harrison said that, while the two teams will try to make the scrimmage as much like a real game as possible, it’s not truly going to be a normal game.
“Both teams are going to do what they do. It’s not like a normal game where we’re scheming everything for them,” he said. “Success looks a little different (as opposed to the spring game). You want to be able to do the things we’ve been working on and try to execute at a better level than spring practice because we’ve been practicing it all summer long.”
Each offseason, the coaches go into planning the new season ahead with an idea of who will play which position and who the starters might be. Still, there’s somewhat of a blank slate and the spring and summer periods allow the staff to have a better idea of what their team looks like.
“We’ve kind of identified over the summer who we think can play from spring practice until now,” Harrison said. “Now we have to make sure we’re right. We’ve been practicing all summer long. We expect certain kids that we put out there to be able to do it. That’s the key.”
The two biggest question marks for the team are the offensive line and the linebackers. The team graduated all five starters on the offensive line from the 2023 season and almost all of the significant experience at linebacker.
“I think those are two groups we’ve got that have a lot of ability. It’s just new guys. Obviously, the offensive line… Oconee is going to be physical up front, so we’re going to see how we respond to that,” Harrison said. “I think O-line is one that we really have the ability and size up there to be a good group. Let’s see how much we’ve grown since spring.
“Linebacker, we lost some guys there and that’s a new group,” he said. “There’s another position I’m excited to watch and see how we respond.”
As for identity, that word is particularly reserved for the offense. It’s not a hard and fast rule by any means, but it is how fans perceive the team. Will the team be a passing team? A running team? An incredibly balanced team? That’s something that will be revealed Friday night.
“Hopefully we have a better idea of what we are going to be good at (after the scrimmage),” Harrison said. “You throw a lot of stuff at the wall, you have a lot of ideas of what you’re going to be successful at, but hopefully after this game you start getting a better idea of what your identity is. What are you offensively? What are you defensively?
“I think we have to be as balanced as possible. Balance doesn’t look the same every week to me,” he said. “Balance just means you have the ability to do both. I think we do. I hope we’re balanced in the fact that we are able to do whatever we need to in the course of the year based on what we’re getting and what we’re seeing.”
Harrison said the theme for the team this season is “Everybody/Everyday.” It’s a quick and easy phrase that hit him after a workout when he was talking to some of the guys about what it was going to take for this season to be a success.
“It just kind of came to me as far as trying to tell our guys, ‘We’ve got to have every single one of you here everyday and, when you’re here, you’ve got to bring your best everyday.’ If you can get a team that believes that, you can do some special stuff,” Harrison said. “You’ve got to have everybody, everyday. I think it’s really fitting for this team and for us to be successful.”
As for Friday, Harrison said he hopes the “busts” are just mental lapses and not something the players can’t physically do. Busts that can be fixed by getting more reps in and not something that forces the change of schematics for the whole team.
“We want to look good in the scrimmage. We want to play well, we want to feel good after that scrimmage. I want our bright spots to outweigh our not-so-bright spots,” Harrison said. “I don’t put a whole lot of stock into (the result), but, at the same time, you want to see guys you expect to play well do just that.”
The scrimmage is set to kick off on John Larry Black Field at Raider Stadium at 7:30 p.m. Friday.
