Morgan County’s rollercoaster experience of non-region competitions ended on Sept. 11 with a 35-12 loss at Mountain View High School. The Dogs (2-2) then entered a bye week, hoping to move in the right direction before their Sept. 25 region opener against back-to-back state champions Hebron Christian Academy.
Morgan County head coach Clint Jenkins said his players had a good week of practice after the most recent game. He described the team’s goal as to “always try and get better,” which he emphasized to his players heading into the week off.
“We want to make sure that we’re playing our best football in the region, so this is the time to peak,” Jenkins said. “We’re trying to eradicate the mistakes and the turnovers, all the things that have cost us to this point.”
Jenkins said that over the last week in practice, the team focused on improving the “fundamentals” of the game, such as tackling, blocking, and not turning the ball over. He noted those aspects as deciding factors in their efforts throughout region play.
“Everything’s kind of day to day and week to week, and play to play for us,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got a really good team coming in here on Friday night, [Hebron Christian Academy] is the private school champion the last two years, and so we got a really good challenge in front of us.”
The Dogs enter region play in a very different position than last year, as Friday night marks the start of their tenure in the GHSA 3A Region 8. Morgan County competed in the GHSA 2A region for the 2024-26 GHSA cycle, then filed an appeal to transfer regions for the 2026-28 cycle.
With the upcoming match, Jenkins said not much has changed in the team’s mindset to take care of the smaller details, but the “stakes are a lot higher” for the rest of the season. He recalled the team’s first four games as good preparation for their challenging schedule ahead.
“If we don’t take care of the football, we don’t block and tackle, we’re not gonna fare very well,” Jenkins said. “The non-region games are opportunities for us to continue to improve, to test ourselves, but once we get to Friday night, everything counts with the playoffs.”
Looking back at the non-region competition, Jenkins said he was impressed with the team’s first couple of weeks, especially after losing many senior starters from the 2025 season. He said the team’s back-to-back losses before the bye week revealed some lack of experience as a young team, and he hopes his players can use those games as lessons in the future.
“Losing as many starters as we lost last year, I thought we got off to a good start, going 2-0, but some of our inexperience has caught up with us the last couple of weeks,” Jenkins said. “Playing higher classification teams, you just hope that it’s kind of a forging of sorts, and you just hope that it pays off. Our kids can draw from those lessons, and draw some confidence from it, and take it into regional play.”
Overall, Jenkins said he believes to be successful on Friday night, his players will need to be efficient in the running game. On defense, he hopes to see improvements in the secondary’s performance.
“We need to be able to run the football effectively; that’s gonna set up the passing game,” Jenkins said. “We can’t turn the ball over the way that we have the past four games, and secondary play has got to be better and has to be able to stop the run.”