The Wildcats faithful will undoubtedly be more concerned with how the football team finishes their 2024 season than how they’ve started it.
Still, fans in “The Hill” have plenty to be excited about at the season’s midway point. Through five non-region games, Richmond Hill has a perfect 5-0 with a point differential of +132. The team now enters a five-game region 1-6A schedule with an earned confidence to match the impressive statistical numbers they’ve compiled so far.
Head coach Matt LeZotte says he’s happy with how his team has played--and why wouldn’t he be? In five games, the Wildcats have forced eight turnovers from their opponents while committing just one of their own. It’s a complimentary style that LeZotte says is working like a charm.
“The biggest thing is our efficiency,” LeZotte said during a Sept. 25 phone interview with Bryan County News. “We're not turning the ball over and we're creating takeaways, and that's really been the difference in our play this year in comparison to the past two or three years is our ability and capacity to hold on to the ball, to move the ball on offense, to bend but not break on defense. We’re forcing other teams to make mistakes. It has been a great start so far.”
A senior-led team, Richmond Hill has used a dominant running game (342 yards per game) to average 40 points per game on offense while employing what LeZotte calls a “bend, don’t break” defense to keep opponents at bay. The experience of the team’s best players–most notably Joshua Troupe and Caleb Easterling–means LeZotte doesn’t need to be a micromanager over the roster.
“This team, they don't need me to stand in front of them to motivate them. They're intrinsically motivated to be successful for each other, and any coach will tell you that is really the makings of a special team,” said LeZotte. “If I'm being one hundred percent honest, I think (a 5-0 start) was always their expectation. I think these guys knew that everything they were doing over the past year or so was building them for this moment. And that was our motto. We come up with a motto every season and it is ‘This Moment’ this year. We've been waiting for this moment and these guys really have realized this is their opportunity to go out there and compete, and to fight, and to put a product out there on the field that everybody can be proud of. They're really doing a great job this season.”
Troupe has 755 yards and 12 touchdowns on 104 carries at running back while Easterling leads the team with 847 all-purpose yards, including 400 rushing yards and six scores on just 20 carries. Senior quarterback Kirk Scott, who started behind center for RHHS last year as a junior, has 333 rushing yards and four touchdowns on 28 attempts. Defensively, seniors Lee Johnson (36 tackles), Gabe Bauman (35), and Omar Khalil (five sacks, eight tackles for loss) pace a unit that has posted two shutouts in the season’s early going.
In its latest game, Richmond Hill received its toughest test to date. The Wildcats earned a tough come-from-behind victory over Buchholz High School, a perennial power from the state of Florida, and it was the highlight of the non-region slate for LeZotte.
“The (35-28) win against Buchholz [on Sept. 20] was a top-five win in our program’s history. I don't know if there's another Valdosta, but that is the only other storied program that we've beaten that might be better and more storied than Buchholz,” LeZotte said. “Buchholz is up there with those guys when you think of competing for state championships in the state of Florida. It showed me how resilient we are. My pregame speech to those guys at our pregame meal was about risk versus reward. And we took a lot of risks scheduling the opponents that we have over the past two years, especially with the young roster that we had both of those years.”
“We had a very young team. We took a lot of risks going and playing Coffee and Ware [County]. Nine out of the 10 teams we played [in 2023] made the playoffs. When you say stuff like that out loud, you're like man, these guys have gone through a lot together. And we lost games too, but we had to be patient and look at it as opportunities for our guys to learn how to play the game at that elite level. We really are seeing the benefits and are reaping what we sowed as far as the risk that we took the past two years.”
LeZotte said he expects the lowest of the region’s four playoff teams to have two region wins by the time all is said and done. Three of Richmond Hill’s five region games are on the road this year, including a pair to finish the season at Lowndes on Oct. 25 and Colquitt County on Nov. 1 in the regular season finale. Entering play on Sept. 27, the region’s six teams combined for a 25-5 record and four are undefeated, including LeZotte’s Wildcats. Valdosta, Camden County and Tift County round out the region, with the Tift County Blue Devils slated to visit Richmond Hill on Saturday, Sept. 28 (2 p.m.) for the 1-6A opener (rescheduled due to Hurricane Helene).
“You have to have two victories, I think, and then it goes to the tiebreaker and all that good stuff,” LeZotte said of his expectations for what it’ll take to reach the state playoffs out of region 1-6A. “We're gearing up. Our region is so tough because there's not another region in the United States that dumps resources into making sure football is successful as much as our region does. It's about allocation of resources and it's phenomenal how they're able to work these things out and get things done and hire coaches and keep coaches, and what they're able to do with their kids, and just how they're able to train, condition, feed, and prepare their kids to go out and play. It's such a blue-collar style of football because it’s just brutally physical.”
“We take it very seriously. You're only guaranteed 10 opportunities, and these guys aren't going to pass up the chance to go out there and play hard.”