Correspondent file photo / Michael G. Taylor Ursuline's Luke Kollar (22) eyes the tackle during the team's contest against Walsh Jesuit.

Not everyone gets a second chance. But for some high school football teams in the Mahoning Valley, the second round of the OHSAA playoffs represents just that: an opportunity to right a wrong.

For Austintown Fitch, the wrong was very recent; the Falcons lost to Warren G. Harding 35-21 just two weeks ago. Now, they’ll get another crack at the Raiders.

Girard enters the second round of the postseason in a similar position, having lost to Northeast 8 foe South Range more than a month ago. This week, the Indians will try to upend their conference rival, which has not lost an NE8 game since 2019.

“There’s a lot of familiarity with both teams, but it being Week 12 and being playoffs, I think it’s a whole different ball game there too,” Girard coach Pat Pearson said. “We looked at things that we did well and things obviously that we didn’t do well the first time around. … [We’re] just trying to find ways to try to crack the code and find a way to go get a win.”

Some teams are more than fine repeating the results they earned the first time around, though.

The Raiders – Harding and South Range – emerged victorious in their respective games, in addition to Ursuline, which hopes to beat Cleveland Villa Angela-St. Joseph for the second time in less than a month.

The Vikings gave the typically dominant Irish, who earned the No. 1 seed in Division III, Region 9 after a 9-1 season, one of their most competitive games of the year on Oct. 11.

“I think we played really, really sloppy in the first half,” Ursuline head coach Dan Reardon said. “When we played with a sense of urgency, and we did that in the second half, the results speak for themselves.”

Ursuline, which has outscored opponents this season 385-97, trailed VASJ at halftime of their game in Cleveland four weeks ago. But a strong second half lifted the Irish to a 24-17 victory, their seventh consecutive in what has become a 10-game win streak.

“My hope is that my team learned that you can’t start flat. You can’t come out and not play your best football against a good football team,” Reardon said. “We were very close to losing that game, but the good news was our kids overcame a bunch of adversity and found a way to win the game.”

Similarly, Harding fell behind to Fitch in their matchup Oct. 25. The Raiders entered the locker room at halftime down 14-6 but put together a strong second half to beat the Falcons 35-21.

“In coaching, it’s take what your opponent gives you,” Harding first-year head coach Matt Richardson said. “So we looked at the first half, some things we wanted to do weren’t necessarily working out very well, so we adjusted and kind of just took what they gave us.”

TJ Parker, Fitch’s head coach, pointed to each team’s first offensive possession of the second half as turning points in the game two weeks ago.

“They went on a several-play drive that ended in a touchdown and cut the lead, and then we come back on the first play of the half for us on offense and fumble the ball in their territory,” Parker said. “They get it again, finish a drive and score and take the lead and ate up most of the third quarter. We had one play in that quarter. So then the pressure is on your offense. You feel it. You got to get things going. Every drive becomes that much more important.”

Fortunately for Parker and the Falcons, they are not unfamiliar with this situation; Fitch and Harding played twice in 2020 and 2021, Parker’s first two seasons as the Falcons coach.

In 2020, the matchups were separated by more than a month and resulted in a pair of Fitch losses. A year later, the teams faced each other back-to-back weeks, with the Falcons winning both by fewer than 10 points.

“On both sides of the fence, we’re trying to find our successes from the previous game – ‘How can we get to those again?’ – while we’re also trying to see what the other team had success with and sure up those things to make sure we take away their big plays,” Parker said. “I think both sides are doing that. It’s kind of, I think, the chess match.

“The interesting part about those quick turnarounds is how you can get to or disguise things that you might have had success with or things that you didn’t have success with, and make the adjustments that still look like you’re possibly giving the same look, but you’re doing something different.”

Teams like Fitch and Girard hope that the saying ‘you learn more from a loss than a win’ rings true, but South Range head coach David Rach, whose team beat the Indians 55-27 earlier in the year, approaches that idea from a different angle.

“We won the game, but if you break a game down, I mean, there’s 160 reps in that game. It’s not like we were winning every rep. There’s a lot of reps that they won, a lot of moments they won, a lot of situations that they won and a lot that we won,” Rach said. “I think both teams are eager to make some changes or to adjust a little bit in order to overcome some of the setbacks that we had the first time around.”

All of the coaches involved know emotions will likely run high this Friday, partly as a result of the one-and-done playoff format but also because familiarity breeds contempt.

“Our group plays with a lot of fire and a lot of emotion,” Pearson said. “That’s been a challenge throughout the season too at times, to not let that boil over. [But] we just talk about being play-oriented – one play to the next, four to six seconds, play as hard as you can – then take a breath and go again and just kind of stay focused on that and not letting the big emotions spill over.”

By the end of Friday night, some teams hope to have exacted the ultimate form of revenge by eliminating their opponent from the postseason. But all who win on Friday will have done what each team across the state sets out to do each week: survive and advance.

“The main idea of the playoffs is it’s win or go home,” Parker said. “You can talk about our winning indicators, you could talk about field position, you could talk about winning the turnover battle. But all that matters in the end is, did you win or lose the game? And that’s what we’ve been preaching to the kids, that winning is the only thing that matters.”