GHSF Daily's Four Questions feature historically poses the same questions to a different Georgia head coach each issue. This season, head coaches are being asked Four Questions tailored to current events. Today's interviewee is Pike County head coach Brad Webber, whose team defeated Region 1-AAA champion Crisp County 9-3 in overtime last week in the first round. The Pike County team, school and community are still grieving the loss of junior player Dylan Thomas, who passed away Sept. 30, two days after suffering a brain injury in the fifth game of the season. Pike County will play at Jenkins of Savannah for the second round on Friday.
Brad Webber, Pike County head coach
1. What did last week's victory mean to the team? "It felt good. It wasn't so much in beating Crisp County, which is obviously a good team. But our team has been through a lot this year with the passing of Dylan, and we've been on an emotional roller coaster. We played well at first, maybe running on adrenaline. Then it began to hit us hard, and everybody was emotionally wiped out. We were just tired mentally and physically. But kids are good. They're resilient and they've bounced back and are playing pretty well right now. It was just a good win for them."
2. How have you and the staff tried to keep Dylan a part of the team? "His locker is set out, and we have his No. 32 jersey and bring it everywhere with us. The first game back, we laid the jersey at his spot at linebacker and played an untimed down. Now we take it everywhere we go. The captains bring it out on the field for the coin toss. When you go to be a high school football coach, there's no class you take to get you through this stuff. This is uncharted territory for me and my staff. We're just going day by day. We try to support his family more than anything. Words can't express what they're going through, so we try to be there for them."
3. How has this experienced changed you as a coach and person? "I'll never be the same as a coach for having to go through this. Dylan was one of my son's good friends, a junior in the same class. He had taken vacations and gone to the beach with our family, and vice versa. So it was not only a player, but one that we spent a lot of time with. It puts things in perspective. You've got to love people and hug people. You never know what the next hour will hold. I was reading a pretty good article recently called 'Winning or Warriors?' It talked about what we do as coaches to teach our players. We get so consumed with winning, but what we want to create is warriors - warriors in life, warriors in their everyday life, their jobs, their faith, what they stand for and believe. If they do the right thing and stay the course and fight hard, good things are going to happen. If you have the right perspective, everything is still OK."
4. Pike County made the quarterfinals last year for the first time in school history. You'll be back in the quarters if you win Friday. How do you feel going into this game? "We feel pretty good about it. It's just one of those things where we were a little surprised to beat Crisp and are happy to be playing another football game. We're just going to prepare and play our style of football. They've got a great team with a lot of speed and athleticism. We don't have a lot of that. We're just an old-school smash-mouth football team. We wonder where are kids are, whether they can regroup and do it again. We'll find out."
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