Blake: Joke on 6-4 all you want, bigger things are at stake at Douglas Byrd
Posted August 31, 2022 2:47 p.m. EDT
Fayetteville, N.C. — There are a few times in this business where something you've seen will catch fire on social media. It happened again on Friday.
Goldsboro 6, Douglas Byrd 4.
Two safeties and a 12-yard run teed up all sorts of baseball and soccer score jokes. But for now, do me a favor and put that in the back burner of your mind and make room for something more important.
The Douglas Byrd program, particularly football, has piqued my curiosity in recent years. In a county where the natural ebb and flow of football parity will drop even the most consistent winners into rebuilding years and lift downtrodden ones into breakthrough seasons, the cycle seems to have skipped Douglas Byrd more than once.
The Eagles were this close to starting a season 2-0 for the first time since 2012.
They have not had a winning season since 2013, when they won 11 games. In the nine seasons since, they have won just 11 games combined, including this season's opener.
"You can tear something down real quick, but it takes awhile for it to be built," second-year coach Maurice Huey said. "We could tear the school down with a bulldozer in a couple of hours, but it takes a long time to build so we had to start off with the foundation."
This spate of on-field struggles isn't unique to just its football team.
Last year alone, the varsity programs of football, boys soccer, boys basketball, girls basketball, baseball, and softball went a combined 2-103. Football had one of the two wins. Now you see why 2-0 would've been huge, yet 1-1 — even if you found the final score humorous — is nothing to be ashamed of either.
"We feel that the football program pretty much kick-starts the school year," Huey said. "We just lost, but 1-1 is a big difference from years past being 0-2 as long as we can continue momentum.
"The volleyball team won the other day for the first time in four years and I think that has something do with what we've instilled in our young men as far as football, and now it's starting to trickle into other sports."
Just a smattering of fans were in the stands for that game against Goldsboro. A faint echo of the roars and cheers from years gone by, greatness gone by, hung in the air nonetheless, making the empty stands feel out of place.
Until this last decade, Byrd was synonymous with football success. I remember being a kid, sitting in the truck as my dad took me to school, listening to Oldies 96.5 play that "Bird is the Word" song (official title: "Surfin' Bird") approximately 5,000 times leading into one of those four championship appearances in the 1990s.
The program has never won a state title but does boast six runner-up finishes, six NFL players, and the field is named after one of the state's winningest coaches, Bob Paroli.
Like any good coach, Huey tried to diagnose some of the issues of why the Eagles have struggled so mightily when he took on the job. He said his experience coaching at Hoke County, Westover, and E.E. Smith had prepared him well.
According to the NCHSAA's Identified Student Percentage figures (a number that indicates the number of students in a school on some form of government assistance), no school in the 3A East had a higher two-year average percentage during the years of 2017-2020 than Byrd (the NCHSAA used two of the three years, dropping the highest percentage from the calculation for realignment).
Byrd's figure was at 55.0 percent of the student body, which also placed it the highest in Cumberland County: almost four full points higher than Westover (51.41), six higher than E.E. Smith (49.3), and 13 points higher than Seventy-First (42.89).
Offensive coordinator Donald Schietzelt worked in Robeson County at Purnell Swett. The percentage there isn't as steep (35.15) but the challenges are the same, and so is the response.
"At the heart it's all the same. They are kids who just want people to love'em, and that's really all it boils down to as a coach," Schietzelt said. "You've gotta ask questions. The simplest one is 'How're doing? ... How's your brother doing? How's this going on in your house.' You could do things for kids and you could tell them you love them but when you really start asking about their life it really kind of takes it a little deeper.
"You've got to have patience with them because you've got kids who have not had structure their whole lives at times and you're trying to come in and give them structure is something they're not used to," Schietzelt said. "It's also going to take them awhile to start trusting you, because they've probably been burned by people in the past."
Huey knows his staff's task is two-fold to return Byrd to glory. The first challenge is trying to get athletes "to stay home" and be part of something bigger at Byrd, rather than transfer out. The second has to do with those empty seats — for his players to find the community they lack in being with one another, no matter what's going on at home.
"(I'm) letting them know that I've been there before, single-parent home or being raised by a grandparent and looking in the stands and sometimes not seeing anybody up there, and that's a tough thing," Huey said. "We try to do more family-oriented, more togetherness, more of a brotherhood so they know 'Hey, we are a family' so that they understand we're together no matter what."
Goldsboro 6, Douglas Byrd 4.
Yes, that's a weird final score.
And yes, Douglas Byrd still has more steps to go to return to its vaunted past. There are challenges beyond football too. But where there are challenges, there's also success that awaits.
Beyond football.
Beyond 6-4.
"Together no matter what," as Huey said.
