From offseason coaching hires to in-game decision-making in the 6A playoffs, Oak Grove head football coach Drew Causey pushed all the right buttons in 2018. The fourth-year coach helped the Warriors put together a 12-3 season with a state championship appearance to earn PineBeltSPORTS Coach of the Year honors.
After two years of missing the postseason, he helped lead the Warriors back to the promised land in 2018.
“It was a successful year,” Causey said. “I felt like our guys played hard all season. They bought in to what we were preaching to them from the first day of summer workouts to the end of the season and I’m really proud with how our guys played all year with character and the heart.”
Oak Grove spent the 2016 and 2017 seasons with many frustrations. In Causey’s second and third years as head coach, he was experiencing some hardships after making it to the second round of the 6A playoffs in 2015.
Rumors of Causey’s job status circulated all offseason, but he stayed focused on his team and getting them ready for the 2018 season.
“I think that’s every year as a coach,” Causey said. “That’s the nature of the business. I think it’s probably gotten a little bit more like that in high school because, start off with the NFL, they’re firing people left and right, and colleges are doing the same thing. I think all of that just trickles down. I was going to do my best job for these kids and these coaches no matter what.
“It may affect my wife a little bit more than it does me.”
Causey didn’t change much about his program, but he did bring in a few new coaches during the offseason. That was highlighted by the hire of defensive coordinator Larry Dolan, which proved to be a smart addition to the Oak Grove coaching staff.
“Anytime you bring somebody from the outside in, they can see some things and say, ‘Hey, we need to tweak this, we need to tweak that,’ so we’d tweak some things in practice that I feel like made us a better team,” Causey said. “Yeah, there were some little things here or there that we’ve might have done differently, and a different voice saying stuff anyways helps out. I think it was a collective effort of everything we were doing, but there were a few things we tweaked.”
The Warriors began the season with a quick 3-0 record before suffering their first loss of the season, which was exactly like the 2017 season. When his team traveled to Petal and earned a tough win this year, that’s when Causey knew this team was different than the previous years.
Like 2017, Oak Grove traveled to Petal with a 4-1 record, but unlike 2017, the Warriors pulled out the win to set up a winning streak through the region schedule.
“For us to win it at the end instead of losing it, I felt like that was huge momentum for our guys, and it kind of showed them that we can come through in the clutch and win that close ballgame,” Causey said. “The last couple of years, that hadn’t happened. I think that was the biggest difference. When I look back on the season, it was that week.”
While Causey had that particular realization after the Petal game, it was after the two regular-season losses where his team grew the most. Oak Grove took it on the chin against Hattiesburg, but it bounced back with four straight region wins, including the win over Petal.
“We hadn’t had any adversity through the first few weeks, and I think every game we started off scoring a touchdown,” Causey said. “We didn’t handle (the Hattiesburg game) the way we needed to, and that was something we focused on the whole next week. We had to handle adversity better, so that was where our focus was, especially for that off week. We started rolling.”
A Brandon loss in October snapped the win streak, but it was a loss that left the Warriors feeling confident in themselves. They knew they could compete with the best in the state. Another example was the Terry game. It was a game the Warriors won handily, but Causey wanted his team to handle the situation the right way. In the previous year, his team didn’t handle the game right and lost to the Bulldogs in heartbreaking fashion, but Oak Grove learned its lesson this time.
The way Causey, his coaches and his players responded after the two losses and the Terry win were why the Warriors saw so much success this season. Oak Grove had all the momentum heading into the playoffs, and three wins separated it from the state championship.
First, Oak Grove had to beat Casey Cain, who won a state championship with Causey at Oak Grove in 2013, and a Harrison Central team in the first round, then Causey’s hometown Petal Panthers came to Oak Grove in the second round. On top of that, Brandon, a team Oak Grove hasn’t beaten since the 2014 south state game, was the last hurdle to climb before reaching the title game.
“It was neat who our opponents were each week and those hurdles you had to get over,” Causey said.
The Warriors needed a good season, and they got it. Causey and his coaches felt the outside pressure, but that’s nothing compared to the pressure Causey puts on himself.
“Every year, no matter who you have coming back or what you lost, the expectation is to play for a state championship,” Causey said of coaching at Oak Grove. “I think we know that going into each year, and we’re going to do the best job we can to be successful. Some years are better than others, but I don’t think anybody is going to put any more pressure on me than I do myself.”
From job status rumors, making coaching hires, in-game decisions and the welcomed headaches from state championship week, 2018 was a year to remember for Causey and the Warriors.
