The Long County Blue Tide football team has made a tremendous turnaround since Mike Pfiester took over the reins in 2021. Entering the fourth season under Pfiester, the team looks forward to new opponents and opportunities as they look to continue on the improvements they have made.
The 2024 season brings a whole new schedule for the team, full of familiar opponents. After reclassification, the Tide stayed in Region 3-AAA, but were greeted with new region foes: Islands, Windsor Forest, Jenkins and Southeast Bulloch, while holding on to Liberty County, Calvary Day, Groves, Johnson, and Beach.
The regular season opens on Friday, August 16 with a home game against Vidalia, an old region opponent for the Tide. Coach Pfiester talked about how the team needs to come out and set the tone early on in the season.
He mentions that it’s “critical” to win that first game against the Indians. The Blue Tide haven’t started the season 1-0 since 2016 - a 22-12 win over Islands - and Pfiester knows how important that is for the team.
“I think that the first game is critical. If we can find a way to win the first one, I feel really good about having a pretty strong start,” Pfiester said. “As you get into the meat of your region schedule, with Calvary and Jenkins being the two that stand out, if we can win that first one, we feel really good about being in a good spot.”
This will be Pfiester’s first group of seniors that he has coached since their freshman year. This group has done several things no other group has done, but the biggest thing is having an overall winning record. The class of 2025 is 17-13 in the regular season in that three-year span.
Pfiester knows how important that is to the culture of the program and giving the kids the feeling of knowing how to be successful.
“It’s important, but it is still a work in progress,” he said. “We talked about the other day at media day that it’s easy to say ‘Well, we’ve always had this excuse, those kids saw how it was before and they let that sink in.’ These guys, they don’t have that. The only thing that they know is how we do things and that’s a good thing, but can also at times be a little frustrating when they do make poor choices or mistakes that they oughta know better. At this point, if we don’t meet our expectations and have a great year, that reflects more on our staff because these kids don’t know anything other than what we expect of them.”
The GHSA also made a change in how the playoffs work in the lower classifications for the major sports in the state this season and beyond. In A through AAA, private schools will still play with public schools, but now all the private schools will be grouped into their own playoff bracket while the public schools will play their own bracket in their respective classification.
With that, comes a new way to determine playoff seedings. The teams will now make the playoffs based on a power ranking system of 1-32 with the region finish now mattering even more.
Pfiester said that it is a blessing to no longer have to compete against private schools in the playoffs, calling it a “step in the right direction”.
Not having private schools in the playoffs means the Blue Tide would have an even better chance to possibly host a playoff game, something the team has never done.
“I think the seeding procedure does nothing alleviate any of the travel concerns, but I think it will be a benefit for us,” Pfiester said. “If we can go ahead and win the games we feel like we should win and find a way to steal a couple other ones, we have a legitimate chance to host a playoff game. In the old format, we weren’t ever in a region where we could get to the top two.”
The expectations have been set with the Tide making the playoffs each of the last three years. The goal has been to make the playoffs each year but to now also win a playoff game.
Pfiester said that it comes down to the staff being able to execute their strategies and do what they are supposed to do each week to make that happen.
“We just gotta really embrace what we do,” Pfiester said. “We talked about as staff about how to recommit ourselves to doing what we do and not stray and be different and be physical…I really feel like this year we need to double down on our system and what we do. That will bode well for us in region games and in a playoff scenario where teams are going to have a hard time preparing for what we do in a week if they never see it throughout the year.”
The team will look to replace 4,000-yard rusher Ahmari Douglas this season, but Pfiester says that the staff “feels really good about giving the ball to any one of those four” in the backfield.
Another key piece will be senior two-way athlete Chris Hatfield. At the end of last school year, Hatfield started racking up several Division I offers before committing to South Carolina in June. He becomes just the third Blue Tide player to commit to a Power Four school, joining Tariq Carpenter (Georgia Tech) and Jamin Davis (Kentucky), and the second to commit to an SEC school.
Pfiester mentioned senior linebackers Kenny Pickens and Mareon Montgomery being big pieces on the defense and senior La’maree Clark and sophomore Jason Familia both having a place to help the offense out in big ways.
The Blue Tide open the regular season on Friday, August 16 against Vidalia, but host MCA in a scrimmage Friday, August 2 and travel to Statesboro for a second scrimmage on Friday, August 9.