On this Football Fridays in Georgia Podcast episode, Hannah and Jon talk with Newton coach Josh Skelton about being a first-year head coach, Mary Persons head coach Brian Nelson about football in a small town, and they tell us exactly what happened at the Mill Creek/Buford game last week.  Plus, they give an aspiring sports broadcaster a chance to make Cherokee High School proud. 

Brian Nelson, Mary Persons

 

  • Game of the Week: Newton vs. Parkview
  • How to keep the team focused
  • Big football in a small town
  • Mill Creek vs. Buford: What happened on national TV?
  • An aspiring sports broadcaster from Cherokee High School

 

On keeping the team focused

Jon Nelson: Most wins right now since 2019. You're right now at seven wins out of the blocks at 7 and 0, most wins since 2019. How do you keep this bunch from getting to look at the press clippings, to not know that we're talking to you for the podcast this week? And so they can continue to focus on the task at hand, which is right now in the — in the short term, Parkview. But getting to those deep playoff runs that you're looking for, how do you keep them focused on the task instead of getting locked into all of the press clippings?

Josh Skelton, Newton Head Coach: We talk about it every day. I mean, we call it poison. And that's one of the terms that if anybody's around our kids they'll hear them say, "Can't take the poison." And it's something we reiterate every day. We think that the enemy to our success is — is, obviously, is us becoming complacent. And how we do that is, you know, starting to read our own press clippings. We start to believe that, start to believe some of the compliments and things of that nature. So our guys do a great job of not taking the bait, not taking the poison and staying away from the papers and strictly believing in the mission that's ahead, you know? And those guys at this point are paranoid to look at anything outside of what these — you know, what we need to do to get better. So the only thing our team talks about is what we need to do to improve. You know, we're not looking at how bad we beat Brookwood or what the score was against Brookwood, we're really looking at the things that we want to improve there going into this week. And those guys have bought in to that process and they're looking to practice extremely hard. We push our guys at an unbelievable pace in our practice and we break those guys down everyday and we want to make sure those guys know how much better we can be versus just how far we've come. So, we didn't come this far just to get this far, so to speak. So that's the mentality and will remain the mentality going forward, for sure.