SANTEE — Chris Carter knows a thing or two, or a thousand, about building a football program.

First and foremost, he knows it’s not easy to move into an area, change a culture, and be successful. So, a day after the Willie Jeffries Classic, he was busy going over film. Lake Marion’s offensive line is huge, but Carter’s boys got pushed around a good bit in their 19-0 loss to Bamberg-Ehrhardt. Nevermind that the Red Raiders have an Under Armour All-American, A.J. Cann, and Kentucky commit Justin Henderson up front, that has to change. Then again, a lot has to change for Lake Marion, which has gone 4-26 overall the past three seasons, to become a contender. More pressing, things had to improve heading into tonight’s season-opener against Class A power Calhoun County.

“I still think we have a long ways to go,” Carter said. “You know ... learning the system. We have a good ways to go, but we made some strides (against Bamberg-Ehrhardt). Still, we are not there yet.”

System aside, for Carter, the building of the Lake Marion football program has to begin with discipline.

“That’s really huge,” he said. “Guys are just beginning to believe in themselves and not drop their heads. When things are happening, I always tell them, sometimes things go right and sometimes they go wrong. They can’t drop their heads. They have to keep fighting. At times, I’ve saw that, and at time they have kept fighting. I think it’s the discipline part that brings that will to keep fighting.”

But, there’s much more to Carter’s plan for the Gators. The knock on football in Santee is that Lake Marion is, has been and will always be a basketball school. Carter has done his best to tackle that up front.

“I had an opportunity to talk with (boys basketball coach) Roy Brown,” Carter said. “When I was in high school, they encouraged all of us to play all the sports. You never know what a kid can do. I tell everyone the story of Terrell Owens. He played one year of football, and he played basketball for four years. He came out just that one year to see what he could do. It turned out, he was an All-Pro receiver. We have some good athletes. You never know where kids will blossom at. Those guys, I tell them, if they want to come out and play, they should. We have quite a few kids on the team, and a lot of those kids, this is their first year playing football.”

Carter knows what you are thinking. Sure. It’s Lake Marion. The Gators don’t win football games. But, Carter has been in a situation like this before. In fact, he has been in a far worse situation. At his last stop, Garinger High School in North Carolina, Carter helped end a 61-game losing streak and eventually guided his team to its first playoff berth in 18 years.

“A lot of things at Garinger, I had to be real creative with,” he said. “They get $5,000 for the entire athletic program and football probably runs you ... if you run a legitimate program, $18-20,000 a year. We had to make do with a lot of things. The game jerseys were our practice jerseys.”

Carter even dumpster-dived for wood scraps so he could build chutes for his team.

“The thing is, at Garinger, we didn’t have many players out there,” he said. “A lot of kids were first year players that had never played football anymore. At Lake Marion, you are not starting from scratch. You are just instilling and building on a program. In my eyes, the foundation has been there. It’s just a matter of adding the pieces and starting to build the program.

“It’s exciting to me (to build a program),” he added. “It seems like everywhere I’ve been it’s been like that. When I started with the Pioneers in the Arena league, that was a team that had to be built from the ground up. It seems like I have to be following those situations. Each situation is a little different. You don’t want to attack it the same way as you attacked the last problem. The formula may somewhat be the same, but there are different scenarios that come with turning it around. The thrill of it, building programs, that might be my calling.”

Carter, an Orangeburg-Wilkinson grad, has a three-year plan for Lake Marion. Results however, should come before then. The coach said he’s ready to begin the “new Gator nation.”

“You should definitely see a turn in the kids from this year to next year,” he said. “Usually, in any program, you have a three-year plan and the fourth year is the golden nugget. By the third year, you should be able to look at the players and see the mentality of the coach. The third year should be drastically different from the first year.

“I think, right now, with our kids, it’s like a syndrome,” he added. “You know, you take an elephant. As a baby, they chain them up. I was always amazed how they could take a rope and hold an elephant there. Our kids need to understand we need to break that rope and change things around here.”

T&D Sports Editor Brian Linder can be reached via e-mail at blinder@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5553.

 

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