The football team took the field at Gaither High School Friday, August 30 at 7:30 p.m. looking to get their first win of the season. 

“The biggest thing we’ve learned is that we’ve got to get better,” head coach Robert Weiner said. “There are some things that you learn when you win and somethings you learn when you lose but, losing brings it into more of an acute focus. We’ve got some fundamental things that we’ve got to get better at.” 

After a 38-3 loss at Armwood week one, the boys were up 14-7 at halftime at Gaither.  

“The biggest thing is for us to stop riding the emotional rollercoaster of the game and to keep our focus in check,” defensive coordinator Greg Meyer said. “I think in Armwood when you get down it’s easy to lose that optimism, and the opposite happened at Gaither we up at half and we let that take away from our focus in the second half.” 

The team would score two more times in the second half, but Gaither would outscore them with 4 touchdowns in the second half leading them to a 35-28 win and giving the Panthers their second loss of the season. 

“We are working on coming together more as a team,” defensive end senior Aidan Giansante said. “We have a couple of people that are just coming in from transfers and stuff and so just trying to come together as one single unit instead of a bunch of individual units.”  

The football team does not have a game on Friday, September 6 and will use the bye week as a way to regroup.  

“We always like using the bye week to do a couple of things,” Weiner said. “Number one, we want to recover from any bumps and bruises we have. Even though it’s early in the season we play some difficult games so we have some of those, so we can use this week to recover first and foremost so we can get ourselves rested and ready to go for the long haul after that.” 

As they rest up, the team also looks to assess what they need to improve on in order to win their next game.  

“Number two we want to get ourselves better at some fundamental things that we’ve evaluated that we need to improve upon,” Weiner said. “These are things we’ve gotten better at over the last three weeks; it just hasn’t shown up in the win column yet, but it something we need to focus on.”  

The panthers play their next game against Tampa Bay Tech High School Friday, September 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Dad’s Stadium.  

“Number three, we want to specifically spend a little more time to hone in on our game plan for Tampa Bay Tech,” Weiner said “When you that extra time, it’s good to use that extra time to get ready to go.”