Football has been back in the air at Habersham Central High School for the last three weeks and it all comes to a head on Friday with the annual spring game, this year against Hart County High School, at Raider Stadium in Mt. Airy at 7 p.m.
The Raiders are coming off a 5-6 season with a 3-3 record in Region 8-AAAAAA, that saw them make the state playoffs before coming up short on the road against Douglas County High School.
Now, Head Coach Benji Harrison and his coaching staff have turned the sights to getting ready for the 2024 fall season.
“I love spring practice for the fact that right now is where you create this team,” Harrison said. “Things we may have been really good at last year, that may not be the flavor of this team this year.”
The coaching staff has quite a task ahead of them, though not one that isn’t happening on high school campuses all around the state. That task: replacing high production seniors from the 2023 roster.
The program lost all five starters on the offensive line and multiple starters on the defense, including Hayden Gailey, Carter Barrett, Braden Henslee, and Jonah Wilson.
The spring is all about finding those players that are ready to step up and fill shoes
“When you head into spring practice and graduation hits you in certain positions more than others, those are the things you obviously have to put your attention to. When you take the offensive line for example, we lost five guys that all graduated,” Harrison said. “We lost probably five or six guys on defense as well. It’s going to be some new guys, but the good thing is I think a lot of these guys are up for the challenge.”
Harrison said the upcoming senior class, as far as the football roster goes, is rather small with only about 13 guys. It’s nothing he’s worried about because that just goes with the ebb and flow of season to season. The upcoming junior and sophomore classes are much bigger.
The good thing about that upcoming senior class is that many of them will play, which gives a good bit of senior leadership and experience on and off the field.
“Our senior class is not a real big class, but it’s a class that’s going to have a lot of kids that contribute out of it,” Harrison said. “That’s always good when you have seniors that play. It’s kind of like last year’s group. That group played.”
There will be a few key pieces returning for the 2024 season from last fall, including Antonio Cantrell and Donovan Warren, who will share carries in the backfield with a few others. According to Harrison, running back is going to be one of the deepest positions on the field for the Raiders.
Cantrell led the team with 695 yards on the ground on 158 carries for 11 touchdowns. He finished the season with three 100-yard games. Warren was the back up and got a significant amount of playing time as a sophomore. He finished the year with 45 carries for 279 yards, four touchdowns and one 100-yard game.
Another deep position will be wide receiver, which includes upcoming senior Zeke Whittington. Whittington finished 2023 with 63 catches for 862 yards and nine scores. He was just one yard shy of 1,200 all-purpose yards.
At quarterback, there will be a battle for the starting position between upcoming senior DJ Pass and upcoming sophomore Paris Wilbanks. Wilbanks impressed coaches a year ago at the junior varsity level, but the varsity team had Pass and senior Carson Parker on the roster. Parker went down with an injury early on and Pass took the reigns and held onto the starting job through the end of the season.
Pass completed 64 of his 127 pass attempts (50.4 percent) for 865 yards and six touchdowns with only five interceptions on the books.
Like many on the roster for spring, which totals around 120 from grades 9-12, both Pass and Wilbanks are getting tons of reps. Despite their competition for the starting job, Harrison is impressed with their relationship and how they complement each other.
“Paris and DJ work really well with each other. They’re competing against each other like crazy, there’s no doubt that both of them want to look better than the other at practice, but you wouldn’t know it by the way they communicate with each other,” Harrison said. “When one goes out and the other goes in, they talk about what they saw (from the defense). It’s been really cool.
“Both of those guys are competitors that really want to win. They’ve both had really good springs,” he continued. “I’m excited to see both of them improve.”
The head man said, as coaches, they all go in with some expectation of who the starters will be, but there are always surprises.
As for Friday night, the Raiders and the coaches aren’t scheming up to beat Hart County and Hart County likely isn’t scheming up HCHS. Harrison said there may not be a score kept anyway, not that he’s worried about what those numbers show.
“I want to see how tough we are. You hit a lot at practice during spring, but you still protect your own at practice,” Harrison said. “I think we’ll see how physical we are. We’re going to make mistakes. I have no problem with that. We tell the kids, ‘We’re going to make mistakes, that’s fine. Just make them going 100 miles per hour.’”
At the end of the day, while it’s good to get the community involved and thinking about the start of the fall season, the scrimmage is about a short-term measuring stick.
“It’s about competing. Compete as hard as you can compete,” Harrison said. “Let’s be better on Friday than we were on May 1 at the start of practice.”
