By the time most people in Centre start checking Friday night schedules, the season already has more than a two-week head start on them. It just doesn't look like a season yet. It looks like a Saturday lunch crowd.
On July 25, at noon, Easy Street filled up with coaches, players' families, and anyone in Cherokee County who follows high school football closely enough to know that the real opening day isn't a kickoff. It's media day, the event where WEIS Radio and the county's two programs lay out who's playing whom, who's new on the sideline, and what the fall is going to feel like before a single snap happens. WEIS called it plainly: the gathering was "marking the unofficial beginning to the high school football season." If you live here, that's worth sitting with for a second, because it means the clock that actually governs Centre's fall already started running while most of the rest of the country was still deciding if it was too hot to mow the lawn.
Two New Coaches, Introduced at the Same Table
What made this year's media day different wasn't the venue. It was the roster of people standing up to talk. Cherokee County High School has a new head coach in Bayley Blanchard. Cedar Bluff has a new head coach in Cole Murphy. Both were introduced at Easy Street on the same afternoon, which means the two programs that define the county's Friday nights are entering the season with brand new leadership at the exact same time.
That matters for reasons beyond the standings. A new coach usually means a fresh look at scheduling, and this year that shows up as a run of games that haven't been played in years, sometimes decades. If you've lived in Centre long enough to remember specific rivalries fading in and out of the rotation, this fall reads like several of them coming back at once.
Two Debuts, One Week Apart
Murphy goes first. His debut as Cedar Bluff's head coach comes on the road, in Walnut Grove, against West End. It's a small detail with a bigger footnote attached: the two schools haven't met since 1997, and West End holds a narrow 5-3 edge in a series old enough that most current players' parents weren't watching it the last time around.
A week later, Blanchard makes his own debut, and his has a sharper edge to it. He's coaching his first game as head coach of the Cherokee County Warriors at home, at Warrior Stadium, against Piedmont. Piedmont is his alma mater. There's no gentle way into a head coaching job, and the schedule didn't give him one.
There's also unfinished business hanging over the Warriors' season opener. Cherokee County's 2025 run ended in the first round of the playoffs, a 26-28 loss to Good Hope on November 6. Blanchard isn't just introducing himself to the community. He's picking up a program that left the field early last fall and wants that fixed.
| Date | Team | Opponent | What's on the Line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fri., Aug. 21 | Cedar Bluff Tigers | at West End (Walnut Grove) | Murphy's coaching debut; first meeting since 1997 |
| Fri., Aug. 28 | Cherokee County Warriors | Piedmont Bulldogs (home) | Blanchard's debut, against his own alma mater |
| Fri., Oct. 23 | Cedar Bluff Tigers | at Gaylesville | Murphy faces his alma mater; first meeting since 2023 |
| Thu., Oct. 29 | Cedar Bluff Tigers | vs. Sand Rock | Rivalry dating to 1946; Sand Rock won 68-40 last year |
The Gaylesville game in late October gives Murphy his own version of the Piedmont storyline. It's his alma mater, and the two schools haven't played since 2023, which is recent by comparison but still long enough that it counts as its own kind of homecoming.
Then Halloween weekend closes the regular season with the county's oldest rivalry still on the books. Cedar Bluff and Sand Rock have been playing since 1946, and the series sits about as even as an 80-year rivalry can get, with Cedar Bluff holding a 36-34 edge. Last year's meeting was a 68-40 shootout that Sand Rock won, so whatever happens this Halloween, it isn't likely to be quiet.
Why This Is the Year to Watch the Schedule, Not Just the Scoreboard
A normal season in Cherokee County runs on continuity. Same coaches, familiar opponents, a schedule that mostly repeats itself with small variations. This year runs on the opposite. Two new coaches means two programs making different scheduling choices than their predecessors did, and that's why a fan who's followed this county for years is suddenly looking at matchups that haven't happened since Bill Clinton's first term, or since a coach's own playing days. The games themselves will settle the won-loss column. But the shape of the season, the fact that so many of these matchups carry a "first since" attached to them, is a direct result of two rookie coaches redrawing the map in their first year on the job.
Where Centre Actually Sits on a Friday
None of this changes where people eat before kickoff. Easy Street already earned its spot in the rotation just by hosting media day, and it stays part of the pregame lineup most weeks after that. Whistle Stop Cafe and F.C. Weiss Pub and Eatery downtown fill in the rest of the pregame crowd, especially on weeks when the game is at home and people want dinner within walking distance of Warrior Stadium rather than a drive. None of these places need football to stay busy on a Friday, but the season adds a second wave of tables between five and six-thirty that empties out fast once the lights come on.
The Saturday Reset
The morning after a home Friday night, Centre has a built-in counter-move, and it's not downtown. It's up on Lookout Mountain at Cherokee Rock Village, the county-owned park that opens at sunrise and stays open through sunset for day-use visitors, seven dollars a carload. Locals who've been going for years know to get there early, both for the light and for the parking. The boulders overlook Weiss Lake, and on a clear morning the view stretches far enough to make out Rome, Georgia, on the horizon. It's the version of a Saturday that has nothing to do with the score from the night before, which is exactly the point. Friday belongs to the stadium. Saturday morning belongs to whoever gets to the ridge first.
What the Fall Actually Owes to July
The takeaway for anyone who already calls Centre home isn't the win-loss record either program ends up with. It's that the season's real starting gun went off weeks before the first kickoff, at a restaurant table, with two coaches most of the county was meeting for the first time. Everything that follows, the alma mater debuts, the decades-old rematches, the Halloween rivalry, traces back to that one Saturday in July. If you want to understand why this fall in Centre feels different from the last several, you don't start with the scoreboard. You start with who stood up to talk at Easy Street.
If you know someone weighing a move to Centre before the leaves turn, whether it's for the schools, the pace, or simply a town where the football schedule still gets discussed over lunch, Heather Stallings is a phone call away and happy to help them get oriented before the season kicks all the way in.
