STARKVILLE — The phone call didn’t surprise Chase Nicholson.
The Starkville Academy football coach considers Casey Orr one of his many friends in the profession, so it wasn’t unusual that the Noxapater High School football coach would reach out to him.
The message, though, was a little different.
“Coach Orr called me yesterday and said, ‘I still love you. I still think you’re a great coach,’ ” Nicholson said. “I am like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He is like, ‘Well, I didn’t know what else to say.’ I am like, ‘It is two games. We played incredible Friday night. We just happened to lose.’ ”
It is odd enough that one of Nicholson’s peers after a loss, let alone back-to-back defeats, but that is the situation the Volunteers’ coach was in earlier this week after a 29-20 loss to Leake Academy on Friday in Madden.
The result came on the heels of a 21-7 home loss to Heritage Academy a week earlier in Starkville that cost the Volunteers a shot at winning the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools (MAIS) Class AAA, District 2 title.
Even though the loss to Leake Academy dropped Starkville Academy to 8-2, it didn’t affect the team’s seeding for the Class AAA. No. 6 seed Starkville Academy (8-2) will play host to No. 11 Cathedral Unit School at 7 p.m. Friday in the first round of the MAIS Class AAA playoffs at J.E. Logan Field.
The winner of that game will take on the winner of the game Friday between No. 3 Bowling Green School (La.) and No. 14 Adams County Christian School.
Nicholson’s goal this week has been to get his team to re-focus on what truly is a clean slate to a new season. If that sounds familiar, it is because Nicholson has used a similar refrain during the regular season in an effort to get the Volunteers to turn the page. In the first two-plus months of the season, though, that was a little easier to do because Starkville Academy, the reigning Class AAA State champion, was riding an eight-game winning streak. Now, the Volunteers, who had their 19-game winning streak snapped against the Patriots, want to start a new winning streak.
“The Heritage loss was still a bad loss. The Leake loss was not a bad loss. We just happened to lose,” Nicholson said. “That’s what I looked at Garrett (Lewis) and Taylor (Arnold) and told them both Sunday, ‘How many times have we been on the other side where we made a play and they didn’t and we won and it easily could have gone the other way?
“It has happened so many times to us this year. It was a great football team. We played tremendously. They played tremendously. They got themselves in position to make the kick at the end. It could have gone either way.”
A last-second field goal dealt Nicholson’s squad its second-straight loss. He said the Volunteers attempted to engineer a razzle-dazzle play on the kickoff following the field goal. A fumble on the play resulted in Leake Academy falling on the football in the end zone.
Despite the loss, the Volunteers still have allowed only 104 points (not counting the final touchdown by Leake Academy), which is the fewest of the five teams in their district by 58 points.
Nicholson said he was most impressed that the Volunteers responded after the loss to the Patriots. He said he wasn’t pleased that his players didn’t respond until late in the game against Heritage Academy. Against Leake Academy, though, Nicholson said Starkville Academy had an answer after falling behind 13-0 and took a 14-13 lead. He said that is a good sign as the players set out to go 4-0 in the second season.
“They may have played the best game we played all season. We just happened to lose,” Nicholson said. “The guys played hard. We hit some big plays that we hadn’t hit in weeks. We had tremendous effort across the board. The play from our quarterback (Lewis) was the best he has played all year. He had to respond, and he responded positively, and we got out of there injury free.”
Nicholson is confident the Volunteers will respond again this week because he has praised the team’s maturity and leadership all season. He feels all of the players realize the finality of this part of the season and they won’t want it to end until they have done everything possible to play four more games.
ACCS, which is ranked No. 5 in this week’s Mississippi Private Schools rankings by The Associated Press, would have been the No. 1 seed out of District 5, but it had to forfeit games and nearly slipped all the way out of the playoffs. As a result, Silliman Institute (La.) earned the No. 5 seed, the final one given to the district champions.
Cathedral enters the game riding a four-game losing streak on the field. It lost to ACCS 39-6 and last week to Silliman Institute 48-20.
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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