By Jeff Whitten, Special for the Effingham Herald

Effingham County’s 2023 region football title wasn’t a first for the Rebels, but it was the first in a long time.

 You have to go all the way back to 1995, when ECHS was still the only high school in the county, for the last time the Rebels claimed a region football championship. Still there are similarities in the seasons, 28 years apart.

For starters, both title-winning teams overcame slow starts in the regular season. The 1995 team got off to a 1-2 start. The 2023 team lost three of its first four contests before catching fire and running the rest of the regular season table.

“We started off up and down,” senior linebacker Bryson Horton said of the Rebels 2023 campaign. “But we kind of figured it out midway through the season.”

Both titles were won in dramatic fashion at the end of close, hard-fought games.

The 1995 title came as part of a 9-3 season that saw Bob Griffith’s team avenge an earlier one-point regular season loss to Benedictine. The Rebels beat the Cadets in the Region 3-AAAA title game 8-7 in overtime on penetration.

The 2023 Rebels pulled out a last-second 31-28 win over powerhouse Brunswick to finish an unbeaten run through Region 2-6A and earn a No. 1 seed in the state playoffs.

Finally, both the 1995 and the 2023 teams fell at home in the first round of the playoffs. The 1995 Rebels lost 28-14 to Valdosta. Last year’s squad fell 47-14 to Lovejoy.

All that said, for Effingham County Head Football Coach John Ford, what occurred last year was great for players and fans and the community. It is also history.

“Hopefully it’s proof that our processes are good and we’ve got great players that work really hard and play hard together,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean anything toward this year.”

Ford knows as well as any coach that trophies tend to gather dust sooner rather than later in sports, where winning is expected on an almost weekly basis.  Effingham County’s 2023 region title was the coach’s first in Springfield, where Ford is entering his fourth year, but fifth in his nine seasons as a head coach.

Ford also won region titles in 2015 and 2016 at Roswell – his last two teams were state runners up in Class 7A -- and again in 2017 and 2018 at Buford.

Ford, a Clemson alumnus and member of the Brookwood High team that won a 1996 state championship, said his success as a coach is both a testament to the coaches he’s had on staff and players he’s coached and is also about more than football. And he hasn’t had a losing season as a football coach since his first season as a head coach. That was in 2013.

“All it means is I’ve been fortunate to work with some great coaches and kids,” he said.

Call this next bit Character Building 101, summed up in a couple of paragraphs. When asked for his coaching philosophy, the Snellville native looked for a way to boil down what coaching is really all about for many who pursue the profession.

“We strive to build physically, mentally and morally tough men who have a positive impact on others and positively impact their community,” he said. “We want to compete for and win championships in a way that honors their community, their family, and their creator.

“We want to do hard things,” Ford added, “We want to push ourselves to the limit every day, but we don’t want to do it in a militant or demanding way. We want to do it in a sacrificial way in which we love the person next to us, we want to make sure we give everything we have for them and trust that they would give everything they have for us.”

That approach can lead to big things, like last year’s region title – and what happened last season can be the start of more good things to come, players say.

“It’s been a long time since we won it,” said senior defensive lineman Joe Polite, one of several All Region 2-6A performers back from last season. “It felt good to bring it back where it belongs.”