The Long County Blue Tide football team was just on the cusp of making history in 2025 as their season came to an end in the first round of the state playoffs for the fifth year in a row.

With a 42-35 loss to Westside in the first round, the team is looking to finally get over the obstacle of winning a playoff game. The 2026 season is proving to be a challenging one, but head coach Mike Pfiester, who enters his sixth year with the Tide, is confident that those challenges will be for the best in the long run.

“The schedule’s a big one. Our schedule is very, very difficult,” Pfiester said of the challenges the team will be facing throughout the season.

The Tide’s 2026 schedule not only features new region opponents in West Laurens and Harlem, the former of which advanced to the semifinal round of the AAA state playoffs, but also has tough non-region opponents such as Screven County, a 12-1 team in A-D2 in 2025, and storied program Lowndes.

Pfiester says that the tough schedule was “kind of done on purpose” but admits that it “got out of hand a little bit.”

“We had a hard time scheduling some games non-region wise because we are just good enough that folks don’t want to play us very bad. So, we had to schedule some good teams,” Pfiester said of the scheduling issue.

Another challenge the team will face is travel. The team opens the season with six straight games away from Ludowici and seven overall away games for the season.

However, that challenge comes with an opportunity that will not only benefit the 2026 version of the team, but teams for years to come.

In March, construction began on a new turf field at Veterans’ Stadium. The team will christen the new field on October 16 with a home game against West Laurens.

Plans, however, did change. Originally, the team was scheduled to open the regular season on August 21 against McIntosh County Academy in Ludowici. In an effort to give construction crews as much time as possible to complete renovations, and give the team a unique opportunity, that game was moved to a neutral site.

The Tide will open the 2026 season against the Buccaneers in Statesboro at Georgia Southern University’s Paulson Stadium as part of the 15th Annual Erk Russell Classic.

“This will still be a great experience for our kids and it will be awesome, but that took another home date off the calendar and now we are looking at six straight road games to start,” Pfiester said.

Pfiester has made it a point to try to enhance the high school football experience for his teams since arriving in Ludowici in 2021. He’s done just that by trying to give the kids as many opportunities, whether it being playing quality opponents or helping lead the charge on facility upgrades.

He sees the tough schedule as another opportunity to get better and see how teams that have had success in the past operate on a daily basis.

“One of the big things we talk about with the schedule is they’re going to be playing some good teams who have guys that are recruited at a high level,” he said. “If our guys want to stand out and show out, then go make plays against those teams.”

He then mentioned Screven County having “two players who are Division I FBS recruits” and Lowndes has a “quarterback going to play at Texas A&M.” Lowndes’ Jayce Johnson is the team’s highest ranked quarterback recruit in team history and he projects to be one of the top performers in the nation this season.

Pfiester mentions the disappointing end to the 2025 season, which saw the team fall just a touchdown shy of upsetting 10th-ranked Westside to earn their first playoff victory. He says that with how the new postseason rankings works, the tougher schedule will help the team improve their seeding in the long run.

“Our schedule in the past has included some teams that did not have very high PSR numbers,” Pfiester said. “This year, our schedule will help with that. If we can find a way to get to six or seven (wins), I think our seed will be better than it has been.”

The new rules for several sports in the GHSA only guarantees the region champion to make the state playoffs with the other 24 teams being placed based on a power rankings system, while the old formula guaranteed each region to have at least four representatives, granted that a private school did not win the region championship or finish in the top four.

“If we can find a way to host a playoff game, that would be huge,” Pfiester said. “If we can make somebody from the mountains drive down here rather than us drive up there, that would be big.”

He also hopes to make sure his kids understand that in the playoffs “things happen at a different level.” That has been a big focus point for the team this summer and will be going throughout the season as they get closer to the postseason.

Offensively, the team lost nearly 2,800 of their team record 3,200 rushing yards last season. That is going to be one of the biggest challenges, but Pfiester is confident in both the offensive line, which features two-time all-region player Isaiah Miller and newcomer Ryan Penlesky, and the backfield, which likely will be led by sophomore Markyl Allen and senior Donovan Antoine.

On the defensive side, Miller likely will play a role on the line with Kolton Pickens and Sandejago Wilson anchoring the linebacking corps. Jason Familia hopes to bounce back from an injury-riddled 2025 season to help the team in the secondary.

Overall, Pfiester is excited for the season and he looks forward to if the team will simply do the things they ask them to do it and the way they want them to.

“I’m looking forward to to see if this team can play the way we want them to play,” he said. “We have a bunch of good kids and we are trying to develop some leadership on these guys. Our senior class is a bunch of great kids, but they have kind of been the ‘in-the-shadow’ type of kids and now they have got to be ‘the dudes.’”

The Blue Tide open the 2026 regular season on Saturday, August 22 against MCA in the Erk Russell Classic at Paulson Stadium in Statesboro. Kickoff is slated for 9 p.m.