By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

SPENCER — The final MaxPreps rankings for 2022 listed North Rowan’s football team as No. 187 in the state.

At the end of the 2023 season, the Cavaliers were ranked 120th in the state. That’s a significant move upward, and it’s one of the reasons North head coach Josh Sophia is the Post’s Rowan County Coach of the Year.

Obviously, you can make a sane argument for Salisbury’s Clayton Trivett, a consistently nice and solid individual who has helped maintain Salisbury’s place as a top-10 2A program. The Hornets are 56-9 the past five seasons, and they’ve gone 11-2 and 12-1 under Trivett’s direction.

Statistically, as far as points scored and allowed, Salisbury was actually even better in 2023 than it was in 2022, and the 2023 Hornets basically duplicated the success of the 2022 Hornets. They staged another overwhelming regular season, won another Central Carolina Conference title, pounded North and just about everyone else who got in their way — and made another third-round playoff exit.

The argument for Sophia is that he was the ringleader as far as transforming a pretty good team into an outstanding team. North did quite a bit more than maintain its position in the local and regional football world. North bounced from 7-5 to 11-3 and jumped from reaching the second round to playing (as Rowan’s last team standing) in the fourth round of the 1A state playoffs. As far as playoff runs, North did things it hadn’t done since the 1990s.

“It was a really successful season.” Sophia said. “We were blessed with talented kids. We had dedicated assistant coaches. Together, we had a season that we can all be proud of.”

In the middle of the 2022 season, North was wiped out at home by Thomasville and lost by four touchdowns at home to East Davidson.

This year North prevailed in a thriller at Thomasville and won big at East Davidson. This North team was different, had a different mindset, a different toughness and resilience about it. Even after getting battered by Salisbury, North came back to win three playoff games. It was an impressive season.

And it happened with Sophia getting a late start. He got the job in April.

Sophia was an underdog and people love underdogs. He was coming home after having been an assistant at West Rowan and North Rowan, and people love homecomings. He wasn’t a hard guy to love. He always shouldered the blame when things went wrong and deflected the praise to others when things went right.

“It’s not like you can go into a season saying, ‘Hey, let’s win 11 games and go to the fourth round,'” Sophia said. “What you do is work hard every day to try to get a little better. You try to get better each week and each game. Our guys embraced being a gritty, grinding team that was never going to give up, and they did keep getting better.”

The key game of the season?

“Winning at Thomasville, no doubt,” Sophia said. “We had a lead at halftime and our defense shut them out in the second half. You could see it that night. That’s when our kids started to believe they were good enough to beat the really good teams. And we knew when we beat Thomasville we were going to get the CCC’s No. 1 seed for the 1A playoffs.”

When North’s schedule was first released, it looked daunting. Sure, East Rowan was a probable win. But next were Forest Hills, Anson and TW Andrews — three 2A schools rich in athletes and tradition.

“You’ve got to prepare for them one a time, but we knew as a coaching staff that we might come out of the gate 1-3,” Sophia said. “We were kind of thinking that if we could go 2-2 that might be pretty good. But then we surprised ourselves and went 3-1.”

North lost to Forest Hills, but Forest Hills went 12-2 and was one of the stronger teams in 2A. Anson and Andrews were both good enough to make the 2A state playoffs, so those were pretty solid wins for the Cavaliers. Anson was talented and lost 22-20 to Forest Hills the last week of the regular season.

North went 5-1 in the CCC, finishing second to Salisbury. Besides the Thomasville win, the Lexington victory was a good one. Lexington was tough this season and improved so much that head coach Charles Morman was chosen by the league’s coaches as CCC Coach of the Year over Trivett and Sophia.

“We had some tough challenges to meet in our conference,” Sophia said.

While North won three playoff games, the really impressive victory came in Round 3 against Mountain Heritage, a top-10 1A team in the final MaxPreps rankings.

“We beat a really good football team that night,” Sophia said. “We kept pushing that whole game on both sides of the ball.”

The season ended on the road against Robbinsville, one of the top three 1As in the state, but that didn’t diminish the memorable journey the Cavaliers made to get there.

Sophia did all he could to make certain that the seniors on the team will remember the joy of the 11 wins, not the pain of that final loss.

North was eighth in the final MaxPreps 1A rankings.

“I do feel like we were a top-10 team in 1A,” Sophia said. “To take that next step, to try to get into that tier with the Mount Airys, the Tarboros, the Robbinsvilles, it’s going to take a lot of work in the off-season in the weight room. We will lose some great seniors, but we’ll return our quarterback (Jeremiah Alford) and a lot of really good linemen. We’ll do our best to keep it rolling.”