West Lauderdale’s Braden Luke pursues a Leake Central ball carrier during their game earlier this season.

In 2016, West Lauderdale entered the second round of the Class 4A playoffs with a 12-0 record before being knocked off by Purvis to end the its season.

Friday night, the shoe will be on the other foot, as West Lauderdale travels to undefeated Itawamba AHS (12-0) to take on the Indians in the second round of the 4A postseason.

Head coach Brock Clay said he always likes to maintain a “this is just the next week” approach to games, whether it’s the regular season or the playoffs. He admitted that it’s natural to want to be the team to knock off an unbeaten.

“We try every week to play it one play at a time, one quarter at a time, but if I had to tell you whether or not we’ve thought about (Itawamba’s record), sure,” Clay said. “We’ve been in that seat before and lost when we had a 12-0 record, and we want to be the one to deliver that day of reckoning as well.”

That won’t be easy, though, as the Indians feature senior running back Isiah Chandler, who has rushed for more than 2,200 yards and 28 touchdowns.

“He’s just a big back,” Clay said. “I don’t know if I can say he’s a physical back because there aren’t a lot of people tackling him. He’s 6-foot-1, 200 pounds, and he’s in the open field more often than not. He has a lot of speed, and he’s a big ole guy. They also have a really good quarterback (Jaxon Nolan) sitting up there with him that appears to be much faster. Those two together are very deadly.”

With the Knights (8-4) making it to the second round of the playoffs, it’s continued a string of success that goes back several years. In 2018, West Lauderdale finished 12-2 and made it to the third round of the postseason, and the 2017 Knights went 9-5 and advanced two rounds deep into the playoffs. The 2016 Knights finished 12-1 with a second-round berth, and 2015 West Lauderdale went 9-3 and lost in the first round. 

You have to go back to 2014 to find a losing season — West Lauderdale finished 3-8 that year and didn’t make the playoffs — and Clay said the consistency of winning comes down to the players’ dedication and the coaches trying to instill a mindset of excellence.

“To quote Vince Lombardi, ‘Winning isn’t a sometime thing, it’s an all-the-time thing,’” Clay said. “That’s not a phrase necessarily as much as a mindset where we have to do everything right every day. That goes into the offseason, the way we runs sprints… it doesn’t matter what we’re doing, we try to do it the right way, and I think that has a lot to do with us being as successful as we are.”

Clay hopes that success continues this week, and he listed several keys for the Knights against Itawamba.

“We have to be able to control the football like we have the last five to six weeks, and not turning it over, it all kind of goes together,” Clay said. “With their good quarterback and talented running back, we’re going to have to be able to tackle well. If we can do that, I think we have a shot.”

Kickoff is at 7 p.m. Friday at Itawamba.