varsity.roanoke.com

JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times

Amherst County football coach Cecil Phillips talks to his team during Tuesday's practice. The Lancers play Pulaski County on Saturday.

JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times

Amherst County football coach Cecil Phillips has never coached or played a football game against Pulaski County, but his wife, Susie, graduated from the school in the mid-1980s.

AMHERST -- The Amherst County football coach was bent over outside his school's wrestling room, a victim of innocent horseplay gone bad.

That was Cecil Phillips one evening earlier this week a little while after his two-time defending Group AA Division 4 football champs had finished practice.

Football coaches and players had convened to the other half of the auxiliary gym to watch tape of upcoming opponent Pulaski County, which hosts to the Lancers in a state semifinal at 2 p.m. Saturday.

The injury -- which included some bloodshed -- came afterwards, the product of some friendly mixing it up with one of the varsity wrestlers just getting off practice. Somehow Phillips caught an elbow in the nose and on came the gusher.

"I saw less blood than that deer hunting," cackled one of the wrestling coaches who had just witnessed the mock bout.

Phillips, 39, Radford-born, Ferrum taught, cum laude graduate of the university of hard coaching knocks, bona fide good guy, can take some ribbing.

He can also take a punch.

Look at it this way. No coach given a possibly once in a lifetime flat-out loaded team his first season on a new job ever appreciated it any more than Phillips. Not after what he came from.

Four years ago, Phillips was the rookie head coach at King's Fork, a first-year high school with a brand new football program. It had been built to ease overcrowding in Suffolk's other high schools, and in the first year, King's Fork opened for football business with nine freshmen, six sophomores, six juniors, and four seniors.

But get this. All the juniors and seniors at the other two schools had been given an option: Come to the new high school or stay where you are.

"Well, what do you think they did?" Phillips said.

A college basketball coach from a while back liked to describe a competitive mismatch as taking a pocket knife into a sword fight. Those were the circumstances presumably sound-minded administrators visited on unfortunate King's Fork's green-as-lettuce troops when they were made to play a full Southeastern District slate that first year.

That's AAA, friends: Deep Creek, Oscar Smith, Western Branch, Indian River.

"All those kids that are helping feed Virginia Tech right now," Phillips said. Against that type of competition, King's Fork had three guys who had started for the junior varsity the previous year.

"That was the most game experience we had," Phillips said.

Here's how the count stood at the end of the year: Other Guys 579, King's Fork 0.

Now as the head coach of such an outfit, you may have been inclined to moan and groan about the sorry cards you got dealt. Phillips worried about his players.

"Every Friday, it was like, who's going to come back? You know, who's going to come back? To our delight, they kept coming back every Monday. You've got to give tremendous credit to those kids."

Year by year, King's Fork got better. When his high school coach Norman Lineburg retired at Radford two years ago, Phillips said he wasn't interested in the job that eventually went to another alum, Matthew Saunders. Phillips said he wanted to stay with what he'd started at King's Fork.

When the Amherst County post opened up, that was different. Phillips had been an assistant coach at Amherst County neighbor William Campbell, so he was familiar with the tremendous tradition of the Lancers' program. He'd looked into it when Scott Abell got the Amherst County job. When Abell took a college job at Washington and Lee earlier this year, Phillips applied again even though he was happy where he was.

"Amherst County is one of the top-five jobs in the state in my opinion at any level," Phillips said. "With all the pluses and advantages this job has, why not go after it?"

Phillips was hired in the spring and for a few weeks commuted there once a week from Suffolk. He took over full time in June.

Abell was cordial and helpful with the transition, sharing information and opinion with the new coach. It was a huge courtesy and a tremendous advantage. Phillips kept the transition simple by keeping more or less the same defense as before.

The switch came on offense, where he ditched most of the triple-option offense they'd been running and installed the wing-T. The players struggled more with the new terminology than anything else, split guard James Rogers said.

"There was a lot more of us guards pulling and getting out into open space, too," he said.

Phillips, who has New River Valley natives Josh Woods (Radford) and Michael Crist (Blacksburg) on his staff, won his new players over eventually.

"We had a great coach here for a long time in Coach Abell," center Sean Clark said. "Of course, there was a little bit of hostility to any kind of new coach coming in. We had to put that aside. He's pulled us together as a team."

Things didn't get off to the best start when the Lancers had to open the season Aug. 22 against Seminole District rival Brookville, which had a dynamite team and a standout quarterback in Logan Thomas. Despite being outgained, the now undefeated Division 3 semifinalist Bees made more big plays and won. That snapped a 26-game winning streak for Amherst County.

The Lancers responded as a coach would have hoped.

"To me, really, I think that opened us up to let us know it was real, you know what I'm saying?" quarterback Anthony Rose said. "We can't be lacking in practice, not go hard and stuff.

"Really, I think that was what we were doing in two-a-days and all that, we weren't really taking it as seriously as we should have been."

Eleven games later, they have yet to suffer a second loss.

Even though he never played or coached football against the Cougars (or the middle school Dublin Dukes and Pulaski Orioles, for that matter), Phillips nevertheless has had more than a few ties to the Pulaski County team Amherst County will be playing .

For one thing, his wife, the former Susie Stuart, is a member of the Pulaski County class of 1985.

That's not all.

"She and I grew up together," said Jack Turner, Pulaski County football coach.

That's still not it.

"Jack was a senior and I was a sophomore when we were playing for Ferrum," Phillips said.

Those were some very good football teams Hank Norton fielded in those days. Future NFL running back Chris Warren was in the backfield and the Panthers were kicking the fool out of the opposition.

"From Radford, there was Cecil and Kevin Sherman and Ron Adams and there was me, John Myers, and Brian Golden from here," Turner said.

Turner was a ferocious, albeit undersized, defensive end. Phillips started at linebacker. It was a terrific defense,

These being football players, there was always some internal competition, of course, the team lead in tackles being one. We may assume it was a lively conversation.

Turner, see, was the team leader in stops as a senior. Phillips, who topped the team charts in that stat his last two years, claimed that due to a superior grasp of the defense, he was often one of the first defenders to be given the rest of the afternoon off in the event of one of Ferrum's frequent blowouts.

"Jack always got a few more series in than I did so he was able to tally a few more tackles," Phillips said with a chuckle.

Considering that's one argument never to be resolved, they'll just have to try to settle things on the football field Saturday.