Corey Joyner brings Albany attitude to state runner-up Carver-Columbus football program

ATLANTA — When Corey Joyner took the head football coaching job in 2018 at Carver High School in Columbus, he knew that one of the things he needed to help turn the Tigers program around was to bring a little bit of his hometown attitude.

And the Albany native, a former player and assistant coach at Dougherty High, had a rather bold prediction about how far that attitude could take them, and how long it would take.

“Here’s the thing. When I first took the job, I sat down with the (assistant) coaches and said, ‘In four years, we’re going to make it to the state championship (game),’” Joyner said. “We were in the Tallulah Massey Library (in Albany). That’s where we were meeting at every day as we commuted back and forth (to Columbus). And I told them straight up, ‘In four years, we’re going to make it to the state championship. If we take the plan that we had at Dougherty with these kids that I think are going to come in, we’re going to be able to make a run,’ and we did exactly that.”

Exactly four years later, No. 3 state-ranked Carver-Columbus (13-2) didn’t quite make it all the way to the top.

However, the Tigers’ trip to the Dec. 10 Class AAAA state championship game, which ended in a narrow 35-28 loss to No. 2 Benedictine at Georgia State University’s Center Parc Stadium, represented a major step up from where the program was when he assumed the coaching reins of a very proud program that had fallen to 3-8 during the 2017 campaign.

Actually, it was a multi-step process, and Carver-Columbus skipped one of those steps, reaching the title game after going as far as the first round of the state playoffs on 2018, the second round in 2019 and the program’s first trip to the state quarterfinals in seven years last season.

The Tigers even had to step over Joyner’s alma mater to skip that extra rung on the ladder with a 16-14 win over Dougherty in the quarterfinals on Nov. 26.

The ending in the title game was a disappointing one despite rolling up 465 yards of total offense — 184 of which and two touchdowns came on the ground from Jaiden Credle and 230 of which and two more TDs came from the arm of Devin Riles.

But the way Joyner sees things, it represented another building block that he believes will eventually lead the Tigers to the top of the heap.

“We fell short, but we didn’t fall short by that much,” Joyner said shortly after the title game. “We gave up four big secondary busts. … That’s what was so frustrating about it was that we gave up four big (-play) touchdowns after a timeout and after we had settled into what we were going to do. But that’s 16-year-old kids. You have to deal with that. But I’m proud of the team, proud of the progress, proud of the direction of the program. And I’m happy going forward.”

And he firmly believes the “Albany Attitude” that he sought to bring to Carver has a lot to do with that direction.

It is derived from lessons he says he learned more specifically throughout his playing and coaching career at Dougherty, and more generally living and playing football in South Georgia.

“What we’re trying to do is bring more of a ‘down south’ way of playing football and preparing for football up into this mid area of Columbus,” Joyner said. “That’s what we said we were trying to do. So it’s a certain kind of attitude that Tifton, Colquitt County and Valdosta play with in that area. That’s what we’re trying to bring here.”

And that attitude also extends beyond the field and field house into the classroom and the weight room.

“Coaching. The discipline of the team,” Joyner said when asked about the biggest difference in his team now from his first day as Carver’s coach. “The way the guys come to the weight room and get that work ethic (going). All of that stuff has changed, and I think that’s one reason we’re in the position we were in (Friday). … Our conditioning program, our offense, the way we do things on defense, the way we hold kids accountable for their actions on and off the field and in the classroom. The majority of our guys who are going off to college have a 3.0 grade point average. So that’s a testament in itself.

“Before we left Dougherty, 100 percent of our kids received scholarships. Now, these guys are doing the same things here (at Carver). We just took that (Dougherty) program over to these guys.”

Joyner is hopeful and optimistic that this year’s run to the title game is only the beginning for the Carver program.

And given the large numbers of players who will return for the 2022 campaign, there is a lot of good reason for that optimism.

“One thing about these guys is that they’ve got a lot of experience because we beat a lot of teams by a lot of points during the year,” Joyner said. “So they’ve already the playing experience, the guys who are coming back next year, the (junior varsity) kids.

“Also, we’re going to have four guys coming back off our offensive line. We’re going to have our whole backfield coming back except for one. We’ll have three receivers coming back. Our whole secondary. So we’ve got a lot of guys coming back next year to fill some holes. The biggest hole we’ve got to fill is at quarterback. So once we fill that hole, we’ll be secure.”

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