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November 14, 2011

Concord reaches NCAA football playoffs for first time

By TOM BONE Bluefield Daily Telegraph

ATHENS — The season will continue for the Concord Mountain Lions football team.

The Athenians found out on Sunday evening that they had made the 24-team field for the NCAA Division II football playoffs, and will travel to eastern Pennsylvania to play the Golden Bears of Kutztown University on Saturday.

“It’s playoff time and that’s a great place to be,” said Concord first-year head coach Garin Justice on Sunday evening.

Concord (7-3) claimed the West Virginia Conference football title on Saturday by winning its fourth game in a row, beating West Virginia Wesleyan 48-40 in a de facto league championship game.

That conference title did not carry an automatic bid into the NCAA playoffs, but the Mountain Lions got the nod from the selection committee for Super Region One, consisting primarily of schools in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states.

Concord, which was not even ranked in the Super Region top 10 last week, passed two schools that had been on that list, Shepherd and Wesleyan, to achieve the NCAA football postseason for the first time in school history.

Both the Rams and Bobcats were nationally ranked at one point this fall, but fell to Concord in Athens. Neither made the playoff field.

Justice said the team’s climb to the top of the league was due to “a lot of factors.”

“What stands out to me is just the heart of our guys,” he said, “just the overall belief they were going to win. It was the sense of family, and pride, and belief in what they were playing for.”

Even if a playoff bid had not materialized, he said, “We were very happy about what these guys had accomplished already. I was at peace with maybe not getting in because we’ve accomplished a lot. [But] I’m extremely happy about the playoffs.”

Concord enters as the No. 6 seed in the six-team regional bracket. Kutztown (10-1), champion of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference for the first time, is the No. 3 seed.

The top two seeds in the region, Winston-Salem (N.C.) State (11-0) and New Haven (Conn.) (10-1), received first-round byes. Concord’s head coach in 2009-10, Mike Kellar, is a top assistant coach for the No. 5 seed, California (Pa.) (9-2).

Justice said, “I was trying to call some of the guys on the committee and see if they could put a few good words in for us.” He said on Sunday at 5 p.m. he was watching the “selection show” on his computer to find out his team’s fate “just like everybody else.”

“I was really glad to see Concord’s name come across the screen,” he said.

In Justice’s first year as head coach, the Concord squad won its first conference championship in 21 years and its 11th WVIAC football title overall.

“That’s a pretty rare thing,” Justice said.

The Mountain Lions participated in seven NAIA football postseason playoffs in a span from 1977-92 before the West Virginia Conference moved up to the NCAA in the mid-1990s.

Justice said the team will meet today at 5 p.m. and will hold a “normal” practice week Tuesday through Thursday. They plan to leave for Pennsylvania on Friday.

“Then we’ll head eight hours up the road and play a football game,” he said. He said normality is important to a squad’s preparation.

“We can’t act like this game is any different,” Justice said, “because if we do, the players will get nervous and out of rhythm.”

But he added, “The focus will be there, the emotion will be there, because they know what’s at stake.”

He said Kutztown has “a highly explosive offense, similar to West Virginia Wesleyan ... a very solid football team, a very sound football team. But if we show up and play, we can beat them.”

— Contact Tom Bone at tbone@bdtonline.com

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