Homecoming can be a coach’s worst nightmare at times, with the different festivities distracting players from the game.

There’s a bit of an antidote to that for West Lauderdale’s homecoming game Friday: The opponent is a fellow Lauderdale County school.

The Knights (2-3) will host Southeast Lauderdale (3-2) for a 7 p.m. kickoff, and head coach Brock Clay said the county rivalry aspect should be a big motivating factor for the players. Hopefully for him, it will be enough to overcome homecoming distractions.

“It’s huge,” Clay said. “I don’t know of a team that doesn’t go out there and try to compete for a county championship, so to speak. Everyone gets everyone’s best game that week. It’s a big thing; it’s one of the better gates each time anyone plays (one another). Everyone knows everyone, and it’s something I can remember 20 years ago when I played Northeast or Southeast. It’s a lasting affair.”

While Tigers head coach Charles Black would prefer approaching Friday’s game like any other one, he admitted the county rivalry aspect makes it mean just a bit more than most non-regional games.

“We haven’t beaten them in a few years, so it hasn’t been much of a rivalry,” Black said. “We’re hoping to get back and get a win to where it’s a rivalry again, because they’ve been good year in and year out. We’ve been really competitive with them — we lost on the last play or in the last two or three minutes of those, so we have to finish the game. If we play for four quarters and give ourselves a chance, I feel good about our team.”

Despite the homecoming atmosphere, Clay said he’s been mostly pleased with practice this week.

“There are a lot of distractions, but for the most part the kids have been willing to work,” Clay said. “There are just extra distractions going on during the week, so it kind of takes away your focus, but we’re trying to get them honed in and keep the main objective in front of us Friday night.”

The main thing, Clay said, is keeping mostly the same approach in practice.

“We’ve had to repeat drills, but for the most part we’ve kept it as standard as we do any other week,” Clay said.

Southeast Lauderdale is coming off a 43-0 loss to Scott Central last week, but Clay isn’t downplaying the Tigers as an opponent because of that.

“The team they had a rough game against last week is no slouch,” Clay explained. “Scott Central has athletes all over the place. (Southeast Lauderdale) is very talented with a great group of skill guys, and their offensive line does a lot of things right. Defensively, we’re going to have our hands full. Offensively, they have a lot of guys off their defensive front returning last year that gave us as much trouble as anyone did all season.”

After dropping their opening three games, the Knights are on a two-game win streak, the most recent of which was a 30-6 victory at Kemper County last week.

“They’re a really good football team,” Black said. “They’ve been like us, playing really good teams week in and week out. They lost some games early on against good football teams, and when you play good football teams, it’s going to happen sometime.”

Black also said Friday’s game is just the latest in a tough non-regional schedule that will hopefully get his squad prepared for Region 5-3A.

“We have Philly next week, and we’ve played a brutal non-district schedule,” Black said. “We’ve been in a tough district for a long time, and nothing has changed, but it won’t be anything we haven’t experienced once we get to district.”