The GACS Spartans take on the region AAA Columbia High School Eagles on Friday, Aug. 27 in an interdivision game to kick off the 2010 season.

The season opener features a reconstructed Spartan football team that is coming off of a couple of disappointing seasons, going 1-9 last season and 4-7 in 2008.

This year’s squad is missing some key players from last year, including Julian Horton, a wide receiver and defensive back, who set the GACS single-season record for receptions with 51 last year. He’s now playing at the college level with the Arkansas Razorbacks. Also gone is Beaux Herbert, a quarterback who now plays football for Nicholls State. Herbert set the single-season record for passing completions, connecting 123 times last season for the Spartans.

Head coach Tim Cokely is a fresh addition to the program. With years of successful experience, including six state championships in Florida, Cokely hopes to turn some heads back toward the Spartan football program — some heads that the Spartans might have lost over the past few seasons. This year’s motto — “A cord of three strands is uneasily broken” — is a passage from Ecclesiastes 4:12.

“By working together, our synergy makes us a strong force, not only on the field of battle, but also in the game of life,” Coach Cokely said.

As for the Eagles, they are entering this season hoping for much better results than last year, when they finished 3-7. The program’s history includes a rocky 0.466 all-time winning percentage with two region titles. Allen Mario enters his second season as head coach of Columbia.

This will be the first time these two teams have ever squared up against one another. Preparation for a team the Spartan’s have never faced is key, and the coaching staff and team that did the better job of preparing will be revealed in Friday’s game. Based on last year’s record for the Spartans (1-9) and the Eagles (3-7), not much of an outcome can be easily predicted for this game. Both teams are coming off of disappointing seasons. The Spartans are hoping to turn a program around that just hasn’t won many games over the past couple seasons. Similarly, the Eagles have a relatively new coach in Mario who is also aspiring to lift up a football program that has seemed lost recently.

It’s the first game of a new decade, it’s Senior Night at GACS, and fans are looking forward to the brand new playing ground they are calling Reynolds Field, which will be dedicated in honor of the late Christian coach Charles “Chub” R. Reynolds at 7:15 p.m. before the game. This is an important opportunity for the two squads to pick up a big win to start out 2010, especially considering the fact they both are coming off losing seasons.

First of all, I don’t feel any different. The first day of school, my last at GAC, was the same as always, just plus a laptop. My friends are awesome per usual but the same, some of them since sixth grade. Our “new” kids to our class this year are students who are returning after only a few years or even a few months absent. There’s nothing big and scary and new, not counting college applications, but even those are basically just another assignment. They just matter a little more.

The only actual difference I’ve noticed so far, besides sitting in the gallery at lunch, is noticing whose missing. Seeing Sandy Jiang get her yearbook at Spartan 2gether day, getting Rachel Huppertz’s old AP lit book watching former Spartan Spear-it blogger Chelsea Mitchell drive through the GAC carpool, not in uniform, to pick up her sister, and Facebook stalking Dorothy Wallis’ dorm room pictures all remind me that they’re gone; even when we were technically the oldest class in 8^th grade, the class of 2010 was just across the quad. It’s difficult to think about that they’re spread out now, all over the country, friends who’ve been together for up to 15 years now separated. Every time one of my friends mentions how we’re going to all be apart next year I rapidly change the subject, not really because it’s hard to handle, but because it honestly doesn’t feel real to me yet, at all.

Which is probably a good thing, because I’m not sure how well I’m going to cope when it finally hits me.

But now isn’t the time to think about that. Fellow GACS seniors and high school students, now is the time to do what Ms. Terry told us to do on the retreat: Live It Up. Yes, we have homework. And sports practices. And college applications. And newspaper deadlines. But, in my opinion, while school should definitely be our top priority, it should never be our only priority. We should stop waiting to feel different, for our lives to start, and set a good example for those sixth graders who are looking up to the high school, like I was. We have to make the most of the time we have with our friends and the people we care about, serving God and loving each other while we’re still here at GACS.

Because it won’t last forever.

RWANDAN PRESIDENT PAUL KAGAME VISITS GACS from BARBARA PERKINS on Vimeo.