Blake: Under one name, Montgomery Central identity starting to take form at last
Posted August 28, 2022 7:02 a.m. EDT
Troy, N.C. — It was a scene right out of the last chapter of Friday Night Lights. Crushed and devastated, the players emerged from the locker room with tears in their eyes.
Or maybe it was a scene from the prologue, with vows to never let this happen again and consoling embraces.
It was a moving sight.
It was only Week 1.
That's a testament to the off-the-field shift that second-year Montgomery Central football coach Chris Metzger wants to see with his program.
"A lot of these kids got a lot of challenges," Metzger said. "We really feel like the Lord called us here, and we've loved every second, but right now we're hurting. The guys have done everything we've asked and they've put in the work and it hurts."
The wins aren't there yet, and it eats at Metzger, who took a Pinecrest program that was close to giving up on football and turned it into one of the best in the 4A East during his 14-year stint.
There have been some understandable restraints along the way that hinder Montgomery Central to make similar on-field progress. No school in the state has had the same sort of wild ride the last four years.
Metzger came to Montgomery Central between the 2021 spring and fall seasons. Montgomery County did not allow any offseason workouts until the season began in both the spring and fall, which predictably led to some struggles on the field. The Timberwolves went 1-8 in his first year and posted a 1-4 mark the season before. This past summer was the first truly normal offseason the program has had, because even Montgomery Central's first season in 2019 had its own quirks.
For one, it didn't have a campus — yet it encompassed two.
The county was eager to get its citizens used to the merger of East Montgomery and West Montgomery, so for the 2019-20 school year, while Montgomery Central was still under construction, players from the two rivals played under a united team while still attending the soon-to-be-consolidated schools.
The Timberwolves had helmets before a hallway, jerseys before they had lockers, and a full MCHS coaching staff but technically there were no MCHS teachers. Home games were at either one of the existing schools, with the first half of the home slate at one and the second half at the other. Seniors still graduated while wearing either the powder blue of East or the black-and-red of West, but they were teammates during the year when they wore the yellow-and-black.
And yet it's odd to think that year may have been the smoothest of the last four.
"It was different, but we still found a way around it," said senior offensive lineman Tucker Spivey, the only remaining varsity player from either East Montgomery, where he played as a freshman, or West Montgomery for that matter. "We came together way better than I expected."
The buy-in from the community has fallen into place as well.
Montgomery Central has all the small-town trappings of a devoted fan base — right down to the hometown radio crew and a postgame fireworks show that was longer and louder than most July 4 celebrations. Donors helped fund a video scoreboard, a weight room, and a turf field for the program with the greater community, not wins, in mind. A packed crowd left almost no parking spaces for its Week 1 opener against Union Pines and a few fans sat in one-of-a-kind VIP seats that are perched 30 feet above the field in the south end zone.
Not even three seasons old yet, it's one of the premier stadiums in whatever region you want to place this county, located in a bit of a no-man's-land where the Triad, Piedmont, and Sandhills areas all meet; a Greensboro TV market with a 910 area code.
It has taken time to give Montgomery Central its own program identity. But it does have one. Back in that field house, those inconsolable players were told things would be OK. They were told they were loved, and they repeated the words back to their coaches.
Moments like that are, in their own way, program-defining.
There's a buzz in the community. There's a united team that plays for each other. And it didn't take some 10-win season to bring it about.
"Once you've got good culture you don't have to talk about it," Metzger said.
