The Bulloch Academy Gators enter the state playoffs refreshed coming off a bye week as they open things up Thursday night at 7:00 hosting Savannah Country Day.

The Gators finished the regular season with a 9-1 record and head coach Aaron Phillips believes the bye week came at a good time for them to work on a few things and get their mindset ready for another state championship run.

“We won the region outscoring teams 145 to 6 so offensively there’s a lot of things you haven’t had to do,” Phillips said. “We have to make sure we are sharp maybe you want to go into the playoffs with the whole playbook ready if we need it. We’ve been able to prepare for them for the last two weeks as it looked like that was who we would play. We have also worked a lot on ourselves on both sides of the ball.”

It is rare to play a region opponent in the first round of the state playoffs, but that’s what lies ahead as the Gators and the Hornets played just four weeks ago with Bulloch Academy coming out on top 34 to 7.

“There are some things they didn’t capitalize on so I look for them to try to take some advantage of those things,” Phillips said. “There are some things we have to work on to clean up this week as we didn’t play a perfect game last time. We as a coaching staff have really talked to the kids about how they are playing with house money. They’re not supposed to win in a two- versus seven in the playoffs. At this point you try to survive and play the next week.

Phillips knows it would be easy to overlook Savannah country day after how the first game played out but with a veteran group of seniors, he feels confident in the team walking in and being prepared Thursday night.

“It has been my mission over the last two weeks to only talk about our next opponent,” Phillips said. I’m probably the world worse about telling them all the ways that they’re going to beat us if we don’t do these certain things. They’ve done a really good job focusing and it helps that we have 15 seniors who won a state title and understand what it takes to try and do it again.”

Bulloch Academy and Savannah Country Day are set for a 7:00 kickoff Thursday at Gator Alley.