Deerfield-Windsor gearing up for second year of GHSA football

There was a whole lot of new last year for the football program at Deerfield-Windsor School. In addition to competing for the first time in GHSA (after some three decades in GISA), the Knights had a new head coach in Jake McCrae.

Deerfield-Windsor went 2-8 (the team’s first losing season since 1998) while facing a host of familiar former GISA foes in Region 1-A Private. But McCrae — whose extensive football background includes a season on the Florida Gators’ staff as director of external relations for then-coach Jim McElwain — looks beyond his team’s record when defining success.

“In this business, if you’re going to dictate success by wins and losses, you’re going to retire early and you’re going to get a distaste for the game,” said McCrae. “That group last year played its heart out and it was a hard ask for them to come and be the first team in GHSA in school history.

“I had no problem with how they competed — we were just outgunned a couple of times. Sometimes it’s not about Xs and Os, it’s about Jimmys and Joes. But our Jimmys and Joes did a great job.”

When asked what his expectations were for 2021 and if he felt the Knights would be improved, McCrae said, “People ask me, ‘How are you going to be?’ and I say, ‘I don’t know how everybody else is going to be?’ My stock answer is ‘We’re going to stay onsides, we’re going to run to the football and we’re going to play four hard quarters and hope some breaks fall our way.’

“All I can do is let my kids know that if they don’t play up to snuff they’re going to get their mouths run through. And that’s our mentality. The second I start worrying about wins and losses, I’m worrying about the wrong thing. I’m thinking about technique and all those things — the score is the byproduct of the process, you know?”

With about 40 players in the program, including eight seniors (Deerfield-Windsor lost 16 seniors to graduation in 2020), McCrae assents he’s got a young club but there’s a good bit of seasoned talent returning.

“We’re a young team,” he said. “They’ve been working their tails off in the weight room, they love football and they like being coached hard and they want to get better. That’s all we can ask for.”

Deerfield-Windsor also has a bit of a quirky schedule in McCrae’s second year, opening on the road at Schley County on Aug. 20 before three consecutive home games (Miller County on Aug. 27, Southland Academy on Sept. 3 and Region 1-AAAA foe Tattnall Square on Sept. 10). The Knights will then travel to Pooler Stadium on Sept. 17 to face Savannah Christian in a neutral-site battle and after a bye week will host Savannah Country Day on Oct. 1.

The Knights then have three consecutive away games at Strong Rock Christian in Locust Grove (150 miles away), defending region champion First Presbyterian and Mount de Sales (both in Macon, 100 miles away), before closing out the season on Nov. 5 at home against Stratford Academy.

McCrae said he’s not getting bogged down with concerns about this fall’s logistics.

“When you string them together like that, you think you need to get off to a better start,” he said. “Hopefully it snowballs into us being able to handle some of these road trips. There are a lot of ways to spin it. I’ve never been too overly concerned with home or away in high school football. It doesn’t change our approach at all.”

As is the case with all small schools, Deerfield-Windsor figures to have several athletes playing both offensive and defensive positions. Developing solid backups will be critical for the Knights, especially in the season’s opening weeks.

“You have to develop your depth because you can’t go 60 minutes when it’s 99 degrees out,” said McCrae. “You can’t do it effectively. But if you create some depth with your youth and your new players, then you can do rotations that get 75 percent of your snaps from your starters and a quality 25 percent out of the fill-in kids to be able to do that.

“In small-school football, you already don’t have depth by number, so you better have depth from what you’ve got. That’s what we try to do.”

Staff Photo: Joe Whitfield
Special Photo: Joe Whitfield