The Gatewood Schools football program is hoping to rebound this year after a rough 2021 season in which the Gators went 5-7 after winning three-straight GISA Class AA state titles.
It was Gatewood’s first losing season since 2014 and only the second under current head coach Jeff Ratliff, who is entering his 10th year at the helm for the Gators.
Ratliff has so far compiled an 80-34 record with the Gators and hopes to win some more this year. However, this is now a very young team comprised mostly of underclassmen. Regardless, the tenured head coach remains optimistic about their chances.
“I felt like we had a very good summer camp,” Ratliff said. “We have a very inexperienced team, so every practice was another opportunity for these guys to learn and grow. We did a lot of growing up this past week. Camp is also an opportunity for the team to develop and begin to trust one another. I was happy with the way our team responded.”
Gatewood practiced all summer in the sweltering heat. The Gators participated in 7-on-7 and padded camps, but also hit the weight room a lot over the past three months.
They hosted a “football jamboree” early in August, with Mount de Sales and Edmund Burke Academies attending and all three schools scrimmaging against each other throughout the night. It offered a chance for Ratliff to see where his team was entering fall camp.
“We learned a lot about ourselves,” the coach said. “Aside from the missed tackles and mental errors, I felt like the scrimmage did us a world of good. It pointed out some obvious areas where we must improve, and it also gave us a solid starting point. Now, it is up to us to build on that starting point and get better as a team.”
Despite being inexperienced, the Gators return a lot of talent on both sides of the ball. There are nine seniors on this Gatewood roster who are all going to contribute in 2022. Ratliff said he also sees a lot of underclassmen that are going to pitch in as well.
“Outside of a few seniors, there aren’t a lot of players who haven’t seen the field a lot,” Ratliff recently told the Lake Oconee News. “Their reps have been going up against other starters. So, they’ve got to grow up in a hurry. They (the seniors) have done a really good job this summer of setting an example and leading for the younger kids, but there’s some competition going on right now for spots because there are so many of them open.”
Despite only returning one starter from last season, the Gators’ offense is primed to have great production.
Senior running back Justin Jameson will be one of the highlights for the offense this year. The 2021 All-State player will lead a backfield that also features fellow seniors Demarian Maddox and Noah Bennett. Junior Evan Bennett also could be a key contributor.
Gatewood sophomore Ames Johnson likely will be taking snaps under center. He will have an experienced backfield behind him but will need to find some targets in the passing game. The Gators don’t return a lot of depth at wide receiver.
Senior Dylan Sinclair will be the most experienced wideout. Gatewood will need players such as John Wallace Thompson, Sean Harvey, Hunter Johnson, Adam Harvey, Jayden Daniel and Jack Harvey to all step up their games at the wide receiver position.
On defense, the Gators return only one starter from last season’s team, but they do have some players who can step up and fill vacant positions immediately.
Jameson and Maddox will anchor Gatewood’s defensive line in 2022, which will look for players like Luke McNeill, Lawson Wooten, Gage Rainey and Rhys Smith, among others, to help stop the run and pressure opposing quarterbacks.
Freshmen Colt Jenkins, Bodie Corry and Mason Sinclair could see significant snaps at the linebacker position this year for the Gators on the defensive side of the ball.
Despite the secondary being young, Gatewood returns Sinclair, Thompson, Johnson and Jackson Hewatt, among others. That group will be tasked with helping create turnovers and get stops.
“We have our work cut out for us, but that’s a good thing,” Ratliff said in July. “That’s why I think the summer has been so good (for us). The guys are competing with each other and also starting to bond with each other and figure some things out.”
After building a long and proud “winning tradition” with the Gators’ football program, Ratliff said he hopes to continue the trend.
“The good thing about it is that we have established a culture and we have been very, very successful the last couple of years,” he said. “We’ve been to the semifinals for six years in a row and been to the state championship four of those seasons. We’ve won it three times. We’ve been very successful.
“Last year, we had some injuries, and our record wasn’t that great, but we lost a lot of close games. We still managed to work our way back to the semifinals and lost to a good Brentwood team,” Ratliff pointed out.
“However, this year, the expectations have never changed. The expectation is to win a state championship. We are who we are now, and we’ve created that.”