Column: Cats' old foe roars back to playoffs

By Marty Kirkland

When Dalton and Atlanta’s Carver High squared off in the Class 2A football state championship in 1967, the Catamounts prevailed 14-12 to bring home the title. But both schools had reason to leave that matchup with optimism about their respective football futures.

Dalton had gotten the details right in its third title game in four years under Bill Chappell, still in the early days of his long career leading the Cats and obviously building something special.

Carver coach Clarence Fisher was relatively new to his position as well, having taken over five years earlier, and the Panthers were going through big changes, too — with racial integration taking hold in high school athletics in the Peach State, they were among the black schools that had been allowed to join the Georgia High School Association just a year earlier.

Good things, it seemed, were in store for both varieties of big cat, Catamount and Panther alike.

That’s not exactly how it went.

As most local readers no doubt know, Dalton continued its winning ways. That championship year was No. 8 in the string of 48 seasons above .500 that continues today. While the Cats haven’t won a second state title, coming up short in four championship games (1975, ‘77, ‘78, 2001), they’ve established something special. Across the decades and generations, even as the names and faces that fill the red helmets and jerseys on Friday nights change, they start each new season expecting success.

The situation was tougher for Carver. The Panthers made the playoffs in 1968, but finished 6-7 and a round short of the title game. They bounced back for three straight winning seasons under Fisher, according to the Georgia High School Football Historians Association, but he and the Panthers never again matched the on-field accomplishments of ‘67, when they started the year 7-0.

Carver turned in a winning mark just three more times through Fisher’s final season in 1983. Then the situation got bad.

The Panthers had eight winless seasons and six with one victory during the next 22 years, when they went through coaching changes with the kind of regularity that plagues most struggling programs. Carver’s coaches from 1984-2005 numbered five more than its total playoff games in the same period — two, both in ‘86, when they were 7-5 for the only winning year in that long rut.

But coach No. 7 might have something tasty cooking.

Darren Myles’ first season with the Panthers didn’t look much different than previous years. His team gave a little hope with a 3-2 start, but faded with losses in its final four games. Then last season, he directed Carver to seven wins and the playoffs.

This year? Well, 2007 has likely done a lot to ease the pain of Panthers fans who suffered through enough frustration for a few high school football programs, let alone one.

Carver, a Class 3A team, is 9-0 and has won most of its games handily. The only real squeakers were a 15-7 win against North Atlanta in the season opener and a 20-19 overtime victory in Week 7 against McNair, a team with four of its five losses to opponents ranked at some point this year. That lot includes Carver, ranked for the first time by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and The Associated Press — the Panthers were No. 8 in both polls this week.

But polls, which in high school football are just for show anyway, really don’t mean much at all now. What does matter for the Panthers is they are once again in the postseason, having won their region title to earn a No. 1 seed and a home playoff date against White County in this week’s opening round.

Forty years after Carver won its only state title, Myles and the Panthers will try to make a run for another one. Just as Dalton will, starting with Friday’s game against Cherokee at Harmon Field.

The Daily Citizen recently published a special magazine commemorating the 40th anniversary of Dalton’s title season, and I think I can speak for the entire sports staff in saying we feel like we know that team better than ever before — not only from clippings of box scores and game stories, but the personalities that defined the Cats. Like the lively Bagley twins, Ronald and Donald, a pair of defensive ends whose sense of fun and humor, easily apparent today, surely made them good company for anyone but opposing quarterbacks that year.

We often say, “That’s history,” in dismissal of something’s importance. But the path taken since these two teams played on a cold December night in ‘67 — to this day, their only gridiron meeting — is intriguing. Dalton’s story, to this point, has far more highlights. It’s no stretch to say that the past success impacts the present, because players likely see that string of winning seasons as something they must protect as much as cherish.

But for those with histories not so pleasant, there is always hope.

History is made in the present. And Carver’s still writing its book, building a better timeline, each victory another step away from a disappointing past.