RON SEIBEL: Amid the unusual, school carries on at Lee County

A lighter moment broke out late Tuesday afternoon as Lee County wrapped up football practice.

Quarterback Jase Orndorff, wearing a yellow non-contact jersey, found a large traffic cone off to the side of the field. Still wearing his helmet, he placed the cone on top of his head and started walking, carefully and slowly, toward the locker room.

“Look at that conehead!” one of his teammates shouted.

A good laugh, for sure. A laugh that helped those players get through an jam-packed week.

Football season, win or lose, was supposed to wrap up last week with the GHSA Championships at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. But a snowstorm, much heavier than forecast, was shutting down Atlanta. By 2 p.m. last Friday, six hours before scheduled kickoff time, Lee County’s Class 6A title game against Coffee was postponed.

The GHSA rescheduled the game for this Friday. With Mercedes-Benz unavailable, the association sent the game to Leesburg, as Lee County had a seeding advantage.

Not that anyone can control the weather, but the extra week of football has made for an incredibly busy week for the players involved.

On Monday, Lee County’s senior class, including the 41 seniors on the football team, presented the capstone projects the school requires for graduation. By the time gametime rolls around, the entire team will have completed a day of semester exams.

Never mind that Lee County football will be playing in its first state championship game. The term “holiday rush” gained a whole new meaning this week for this crew.

This isn’t the latest a high school football season has run in Georgia, although this is the first time state championship games have been delayed because of weather on championship weekend. The season was pushed back a week in 2001 because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and championship games didn’t take place until Dec. 21 and Dec. 22 that year.

Still, these high school student-athletes, along with those from the other 11 teams that had their championship games delayed, are having to adjust on the fly unlike just about any other state finalist in Georgia high school football history.

However this championship game turns out, these Lee County players will have been through a lot, from opening the season with a close game on a hot August afternoon at Mercer’s Five Star Stadium to rallying from a 25-point deficit in the semifinals to the disappointment of not being able to close the season in the Atlanta Falcons’ new home because of something completely beyond anyone’s control.

Lee County head coach Dean Fabrizio summed up the events of last weekend this way:

“We’ve tried to use this as a teaching moment for our kids,” he said. “Obviously they were very disappointed that they didn’t get to play in the Mercedes-Benz (Stadium). We all were, our community was. But we try to teach our kids, ‘In life you’re going to have big disappointments. You don’t have time to dwell on them. You’ve got to come back and get right back to work and put those behind you.’

“We tried to stress this to our kids and make this a learning experience that, ‘Hey, you’ve got to be able to overcome disappointment quickly in life,’ and hopefully they can draw upon this later in their lives because that’s what we’re trying to do here in high school athletics, is to teach lessons that they can use later on in life.”

Whatever happens once they finally get this championship game played, the players on this Lee County team will have been through the ride of a lifetime.

Contact sports editor Ron Seibel at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ronseibel.