THOMASVILLE – The Thomasville Bulldogs will host the Brantley County Herons in an effort to increase their region record to 4-1. The Bulldogs are coming off an excellent victory over region rival Fitzgerald, but for head coach Jonathan DeLay it’s back to that 1-0 mentality. A bounce-back win on Friday night was great, but now it’s time to take care of the Herons.

“It’s like I told the kids,” DeLay said. “Now that’s over and we have to go take care of business.”

Thomasville does need to be careful against this Brantley team. The Herons are coming off a bye week, and last time they came off a bye week they beat a decent Jeff Davis team 28-21. Also, while their offense is not particularly dangerous, Brantley’s special teams is an entirely different story. They scored just one offensive touchdown in their 28-21 win over Jeff Davis. The other three scores came on special teams.

The Herons average 27.5 yards per punt return and, in three of their six games played, have netted over 100 return yards. They had 247 against Jeff Davis.

For Thomasville, this game is a perfect opportunity for them to work on discipline. Penalties have been the Bulldogs’ Achilles heel. When they are disciplined and playing to their capability, there may not be a team in Georgia that can beat them. However, the only team that can beat Thomasville is Thomasville. 

In their loss to Worth County, the Bulldogs had double-digit penalties that took away several scoring opportunities. There were fewer penalties against Fitzgerald, but still several missed opportunities due to penalties by the Bulldogs. 

“Every week you’ve got to work to be better than you were the week before,” said DeLay. “This week we are going to continue to strive to play a perfect game. That’s the goal is to play a perfect game. If you hit a perfect game you might be the only team in the history of football to do that, but if you get close to playing a perfect game you have an opportunity to win and to win the right way. We’re trying to constantly, with our fundamentals and our field time, clean up mistakes so that they don’t come back and bite us in the rear end.”

This Friday also marks Senior Night for the Bulldogs as they recognize 29 seniors on their roster.

“We want to send them out on senior night the right way,” said DeLay. “That’s been the message to the team this week. We’ve got to practice a certain way and play a certain way and go and be better than we were last Friday and go win this game the right way.”

Thomasville will welcome in Brantley for Senior Night this Friday at 8:00 p.m.