If you look at the scoreboard from last Friday night, you’ll see that Seckinger and Winder-Barrow played in the list of 200 or so games from the week. The game might have been lost in the shuffle by most, but for some it was a reminder that paths forward can be made in the smallest steps. 

Seckinger won 20-15, but the Jaguars weren’t supposed to be the Doggs original opponent. That was supposed to be Apalachee, site of the school shooting that took four lives and traumatized a community.

Robert Paxia, the head coach for Winder-Barrow, and Tony Lotti, the head coach at Seckinger, got together and made that match-up happen. Both teams were coming off bye weeks and it turned into a version of the “Battle for Barrow” with a twist and an unavoidable connection.  

Lotti left Apalachee before the 2023 season to take over at Seckinger and his Defensive Coordinator, Mike Hancock, took over and became head coach. Some of the Lotti staff followed him to Seckinger and some stayed behind. That created openings like the one slain coach Ricky Aspinwall took when he came from Mountain View. Those three schools are wrapped together with Seckinger taking some students from Mill Creek and Mountain View and the staffs coming from all three directions to work in the same footprints. 

“Any chance for students to get back to some kind of normalcy is always a good thing,” Paxia tells me. “The way the community was impacted. The way your on-field rivals were impacted ... it gave us a chance to get into the routine again, play a game, and push through.” 

Robert Paxia

Winder-Barrow coach Robert Paxia

Credit: Main Street News

Paxia says it was a drizzly night to play. There was a pre-game moment of silence and the mood was understandably somber. But the turnout was good on both sides. 

“Any time you can get back to normal, it’s good,” he says. “And one thing we’ve all come to notice about these last few weeks is that young people today are incredibly resilient.” Paxia has been at Winder-Barrow through COVID and other on-campus or near-campus challenges in recent years. He knows there’s no handbook for any of this that those of us on the outside are seeing from afar and what he and those nearby are seeing up close. 

“I have talked to Coach Hancock every couple of days,” Paxia tells me. “For both of us it’s, ‘What can I do for you?’ We’re rivals but we represent the same community. We want them to be successful except for the time when we face each other on the field. There’s a standard of excellence here in the county and our competition allows us to have all those different levels of success.” 

Coach Paxia knows that his county rivals want to play at some point. But the “Battle for Barrow” went in a bit of a different direction Friday.  

“A lot of these players have gone against each other since they were 6 years old,” he admits. “We want to support Apalachee the best way we can with whatever they may be looking for...” 

The Doggs will do so after the loss in a region game against Alcovy.  

“We’re 2-2, but I tell our players that if five or six plays go our way, we’re looking at 4-0 right now -- against a really tough schedule to this point. We just need to be the ones to find those five or six plays now, focus on ourselves, and get better in our region play.” 

But as Coach Paxia and the Doggs left Seckinger to head home, Coach Lotti still was deep in conversation with folks who had made the trip from Apalachee just to watch a game, maybe get out of the house, take some deep breaths, and stand off to the side for a change.  

“I’m just glad they didn’t turn the stadium lights out on us at the stadium,” he says. “We just stood there and talked for a while. Sometimes, you just want to be able to throw your arms around someone and tell them you love them. It was an emotional night for me personally.” 

Tony Lotti

Tony Lotti was head coach at Apalachee before taking the Seckinger job in 2023.

Credit: Athens Banner Herald

Lotti, admittedly, with his connections and the lack of being able to connect as regularly as he would like, still feels levels of helplessness only few can relate to from the last few weeks. You ask about why’s and where’s. You know the steps that were taken in those Apalachee hallways. 

“Up until last year, I was there.” 

He has always had a feeling that, if you’re doing ‘coaching’ right, it’s a calling and not a job- especially, if you do it a long time. You build up communities wherever you go. He can pick up the phone and call over to coaches and administrators at Apalachee that taught his children as an example. 

“And I feel that God has called me to do this. Part of all this is that you develop support systems that can rally around each other where you are and stay from where you’ve been.” He’s had to be the one to help deliver horrible news on the Seckinger campus to players on his team and it’s so much bigger than football and being a football coach. 

“You’re close to people and you don’t want to see them hurt,” Lotti says looking at Apalachee wishing he could do more. “You don’t want them to feel any anguish. It can be something as simple as a text sometimes to reach out to them. But the hardest thing in all of this today is trying to make sense of a senseless situation.” 

In the simplest ways, though, you can show support from only a few miles away. Coach Lotti made a decal that he had placed on the back of the Seckinger helmets for the game against Winder-Barrow. Something that meant a lot with a past, shown in a present, facing an unknown future on multiple fronts.

“Darkness is the absence of light,” he explains about the black heart base. “And in the white dove, you have peace and light wrapping itself around the Apalachee ‘A’ as it comes out of the dark.” Plus, knowing Coach Aspinwall going back to his time at Mountain View, the helmets had an “RA” sticker right next to the decal. 

And with the win over Winder-Barrow, Seckinger is now 4-0. That’s the most wins in the school’s short history already and they start their region play at Roswell this Friday night.    

There’s a poem that is close to Lotti. It’s written by Linda Ellis called “The Dash.” It has to do with a man giving a eulogy and discussing a tombstone. The tombstone lists a birth and death date with the dash in between those numbers. The dash represents to Ellis and her main character all the activity in between. The poem ends this way: 

If we treat each other with respect 
and more often wear a smile, 
remembering that this special dash 
might only last a little while. 

So, when your eulogy is being read, 
with your life’s actions to rehash… 
would you be proud of the things they say 
about how you spent YOUR dash? 

In a football sense the dash we all see that divides wins and losses, Lotti maintains, looks at how young people’s lives were entrusted to coaches and mentors and asks one thing: 

“Were you significant? It’s looking at it more from the people-driven aspect of a quest to help people grow rather than looking at it as a quest for success tied to win and loss. It’s the reason I do this. It’s about relationships built on trust and belief and, upon that over time, you build a culture. It’s the same thing we did at West Hall and at Apalachee. 

“The logo changes on the side of the helmet, but the person should never change. The dash is where my staff and I come in. You hope young people can trust you and they understand that you have their best interests at heart and that we care about them.” And he has two coaches on his staff that he coached in earlier times that are living examples of that dash in present-day.  

“But, at the end of the day, it’s about happiness and relationships that you build and nurture. You hope that the kids and parents see that and that we build on the idea that we have people who choose to play football- not any other angle of that.  

“When you’re trusted with someone else’s kid, that’s a gift. And I think we were all hand-picked to be where we are. Nothing has meant more to me as a person.” 

And for this very tough section of the “dash” in four schools in two counties, all the coaches and people tied to the schools themselves will band together and help each other through this... 

Of that, Tony Lotti has no doubt... 

And we’ll be right there with all of them...  

Play it safe, everyone... I’ll talk to you soon...