Butterflies abound as Carolina Forest, Conway prepare for playoff openers

When Carolina Forest’s opening started bleeding Conway of students in 1997, the two schools’ football programs immediately took much different paths.

The Tigers staved off enrollment losses in the decade that followed to play in four state championship games. In that same time span, the Panthers had four head coaches.

Then the trails started to look a bit more similar, as both suffered through some lean years. Losses piled up. It’s safe to say both have pulled themselves out of it.

Chuck Jordan’s Conway team is 9-2 and playing host to Westwood on Friday to open the playoffs. Carolina Forest, which has made the Class AAAA postseason for the first time, is heading to Goose Creek.

But if there is a residual effect for how bad things were prior to this season, it is this: Both rosters are full of guys with zero playoff experience. So how do the two coaches’ and their staffs combat that?

“That’s a pretty hard question,” Panthers coach Marc Morris said. “Playoff experience is everything, in my opinion. There is not a tomorrow. Every day could be your last Monday practice, your last Tuesday practice. The team you’re playing, you assume they’re doing exact same thing.”

The actual answer for both programs was evident during practice this week. There was a get-in and get-your-work-done mentality radiating from the coaching staffs, each of which are loaded with guys who have had playoff success in the past, albeit it at Carolina Forest, it came at another school or another sport.

Getting that to translate to players, though, isn’t always easy.

Take this year’s Conway senior class, for instance. The Tigers haven’t been to the playoffs since 2012 (when they suffered a blowout loss to Goose Creek that then set off a number of appeals and a legal battle). Only a handful of then-freshmen even made the trip, and outside of now-injured Bryan Edwards, none of them saw significant playing time.

“You get butterflies in your stomach. ‘Wow, we’re finally here,’” Tigers lineman Casey Hughes said. “We’re not scared. We’re happy to be here. But a lot of young guys aren’t sure how to [be ready] for it.”

Hughes admitted that some of the older guys aren’t either.

That’s because Conway hasn’t won a playoff game since 2008. And even though this year’s team finished second in Region VI-AAAA and earned a home playoff game, there’s no guarantee of adding postseason victory to their tally.

For as much as home-field advantage holds up in the state’s lower three classifications - where at least three-quarters of the higher-seeded squads win in the opening round from year to year - the two Class AAAA brackets are a bit more even.

Since the current format went into effect in 2006, No. 10 seeds in the two brackets have won seven times out of 18 games. Three of the wins by No. 7 seeds in those match-ups were decided by three points or less.

The system used to determine seeding no longer has any effect now that the brackets are locked in. However, it does show just how close two teams can be. In this case, Westwood (8-3) finished the regular season with 35 points in the strength-of-schedule formula, while Conway ended with 35.5.

“It’s so balanced,” Jordan said. “That’s what I told the team — the team we’re going to play on Friday is just as good as we are. There’s not a whole lot of difference.”

It’s of little surprise that the two staffs with postseason experience are preaching just that to the players who don’t have any. Historical perspective has to be vague, and concentration on the opponents at hand has to be anything but.

In some ways, Jordan and Morris have also downplayed what is at hand, too.

The second-year Carolina Forest coach, after winning playoff games at two North Carolina schools, has maintained much of his in-house message with his current team despite losing three of the last four games.

“It’s a long process. It doesn’t happen overnight,” he said. “If you don’t succeed, it’s because of what you did all year long; it’s not because of one Friday night.”

For Jordan, he said he personally felt like he was “back in the 2000s,” citing that historic stretch that led to deep playoff runs. He also knows that’s wasted talk for players, some of whom were still in diapers, when much of that went down.

“It’s just another ballgame. You’ve got to prepare that way and approach it that way,” Jordan said. “You’ve got to get them to play to their full potential. That’s all you can do.”

This story was originally published November 19, 2015 at 7:17 PM with the headline "Butterflies abound as Carolina Forest, Conway prepare for playoff openers."