HOMERVILLE — There’s just 24 days until supper time, but the Clinch County Panthers are already feeling hungry.

Clinch came up a game short of back-to-back appearances in the Class A state championship game this past season and the Panthers have spent the months since working to satisfy the craving of another shot at the title.

And in this case, “Panthers” refers to nearly a third of the boys that attend Clinch County High School.

“I think this is probably one of the best, if not the best, summer we’ve overhead,” Clinch head coach Jim Dickerson said Tuesday. “We probably average 40 plus, probably even 50 plus, guys every day on a voluntary basis.

“And that may not sound that great if you’re sitting at a 6A school or a 7A school, but when you realize we only have a little over 150 boys in our high school grades 9-12 and we’re averaging 50 of them, so a third of our male population has been out here every day all summer long. It’s pretty tremendous.”

Clinch capped a 13-1 season with a state championship in 2015 and followed it up with a 9-1 regular season and a home game in the semifinal round of the Class A playoffs. But McIntosh County Academy upended Clinch at Donald Tison Field to deny the Panthers’ return to the Georgia Dome.

For as heartbreaking as the loss was at the time, Clinch County has used the defeat as motivation to return to the promise land in 2017.

Dickerson said neither the coaches or players have dreaded coming to practice even throughout the dog days of summer.

Now that they know the way to the destination, the Panthers are relishing the journey.

“Obviously we want to get better every day and we were kind of sharing with the kids the other day, one of my coaches over here is a big Alabama fan and Nick Saban is always taking about ‘the process’ or if you’re a Navy SEAL you’re taking about how you eat elephant, how do you eat elephant? One bite at a time,” Dickerson said. “We’re enjoying the grind. We’re enjoying the day-to-day things and we’re working hard and doing the process.

“Obviously, we’d love to play for a state championship or be in a semifinal game again, but in Class A it’s a slippery slope. We just want to have fun, we want to enjoy it. We want to make these guys better citizens than they are football players and make this be one of the greatest memories of their lives.”

The Panthers return much of their offensive production from a year ago in rising-junior Trezman Marshall and senior Charles McClelland — both of which have already received DI offers from some of the top college football teams in the nation.

McClelland threw for 160 yards and four scores last season in addition to 1,159 yards rushing and 15 touchdowns on an average of 10 yards per carry. Marshall passed for 485 yards and 13 touchdowns with just one interception, rushed for 391 yards and five touchdowns, and played linebacker in his spare time, making 53 stops, including 10 behind the line of scrimmage.

Clinch may have also found some game-changing help from an unexpected source this summer.

For years, the Panthers have struggled to find a consistent kicking game, in recent seasons deciding to abandon field goals and extra points entirely in favor of fourth downs and two-point attempts, but this offseason a pair of Clinch County baseball players are trying to change that.

Warren Stovall is a rising-junior outfielder and pitcher with the Panthers, and Zack Robbins played junior varsity baseball as a freshman. Both have spent their summers alternating reps, one kicking, the other the holder, in an attempt to provide Clinch the luxury of a reliable kicker.

“It’s kind of funny because these two are career baseball players,” Dickerson said. “They have focused on baseball their whole career, but what they have done is, they have felt sorry for us that we don’t even attempt extra points and certainly not field goals…

“I don’t know how their legs are holding out. They basically work three hours a day, so we’re excited about those guys. We’re going to give them every opportunity and it’s their job to lose.”

Clinch opens its season against Bleckley County in Cochran at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 18.

Derrick Davis is the sports editor at the Valdosta Daily Times.