Princeton – Nate Tanner left Wheeling Island Stadium on Dec. 3, 2022 sick.
In a year where Martinsburg, winners of seven of the last eight state title games that have been played, lost in the semifinals there was a route for his Parkersburg South team to claim a title.
The stars aligned and Tanner’s 2022 squad bulldozed to the Class AAA title with talent covering the issues that hadn’t proved prohibitive.
Until they finally were.
As talented as Tanner’s South team was, a trending turnover issue proved costly.
Up 3-0 with under two minutes to play in the first half the ’22 title game against Huntington, South QB Robert Shockey was strip-sacked leading to a Huntington touchdown before the break.
He was nearly strip-sacked again in the second half but a replay review overturned the call. Even without it the Patriots couldn’t overcome their own miscues, losing three fumbles, throwing an interception and committing an astounding 15 penalties for 135 yards.
Those mistakes turned a 7-3 title game with 14 minutes to play into a 28-3 loss that looks worse than the actual game script would suggest.
“Being sick, that’s a great way to explain it,” Tanner, now the head coach at Princeton said. “I want to preface it with all those kids and that staff, they were awesome. I love all of them and that was a fantastic year. I’ll cherish it forever but there were some things throughout the year that I’d classify as little things and we would address them but we never nipped them in the bud. They never fully got fixed and it came to a head in the last game of the season – really the last 13 minutes of the game.
“A lot of things just kind of snowballed there and it just came down to details, execution and details within behavior too. It was a huge learning experience – great experience getting to get there with those guys. But a huge learning experience.”
Turnovers and mistakes weren’t limited to that game. In the regular season finale at Princeton that South team muffed the opening kickoff and failed on a fake punt attempt at their own 24 that allowed Princeton to take a 21-7 lead.
Talent took over and South eventually took a 49-41 lead late in the fourth quarter but a bad snap followed by a Brad Mossor interception gave the Tigers a chance to send the game to overtime with the ball at the South 31. The Patriots ultimately escaped and hosted throughout the postseason but it was an example of what eradicated a title opportunity.
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Tanner is no stranger to the big stage.
As a junior at Giles, Va. he helped lead the Spartans to a 13-1 championship season where they beat Manassas Park 35-34 in the title game. But he experienced both sides, falling in the state championship game as a senior.
“I know at Giles when we won a state title, when you look at the roster, the guys that were playing on the field – we just had our 20-year reunion and majority of those guys ended up being great men,” Tanner said. “They ended up being blue collar works, gritty and they get stuff done. The year we lost it we still had a lot of great people but not quite as good as the year before. As a coach you’ve really got to hammer that stuff in.”
Above all the people and the details are what separate title teams. It goes beyond the Xs and Os and jimmies and joes, a lesson Tanner took away early from being on both sides of a title game.
“The people running it and the people that are on the field (are important),” Tanner said. “Obviously you have to have talent and ability and behavior and character is at the forefront because whenever you make it to a state championship, whether people want to say it or not, it’s a big deal. The environment’s different and everyone around makes it different too. I hear kids all throughout the day say, ‘It’s time to lock in.’
“I told them, ‘Look, you’ve been locked in since April. You don’t need to change your level of locked in or focused. Y’all have done a fantastic job of that and it goes back to the little things that lead to big things. On my end you’ve got to ensure if you’re trying to win a state championship you’re trying to do it April 1 on Monday in the squat rack. When you get used to behaving like that it takes care of itself.”
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When Tanner took the head coaching job at Princeton in the spring, he knew he was inheriting a talented roster, having faced the Tigers each year over the last half decade.
The program made its first title game appearance in history in 2023, falling to that aforementioned Martinsburg program. The 2024 campaign was full of anticipation with a large part of the 2023 core returning coupled with a drop to a more suitable classification. But that anticipation came to halt in a semifinal loss to Herbert Hoover.
Unbeknown at the time, it would be the final game in former head coach Keith Taylor’s tenure as he resigned in February. At the urging of mentors and friends in the Princeton community, Tanner applied and became the new head coach at Princeton.
From there the work began as Tanner made multiple trips from Parkersburg to Princeton each week while transitioning his family down to Mercer County.
It was an endeavor that earned him the trust of his new roster.
“We hit the weight room real hard this offseason,” all-state tackle Landyn Moore said. “As soon as coach Tanner got the coaching job we hit the weight room real hard and that’s one big thing we really hit. All summer we just perfected our craft.”
Eight months and 13 games later, Tanner’s led the Tigers back to the title game just as he did at South three years ago. But he’s applied the hard lessons he learned from the end of that ’22 campaign in hopes of avoiding the same mistakes and more importantly the same outcome his team faced on that sunny Saturday in Wheeling.
When problems have popped up internally this season, he’s moved to squash them and the Tigers aren’t immune to them. They’ve been plagued by penalties over the last two seasons to the point that each time the statistical successes of a player are shared on social media, it’s often met with the comment, “Imagine how many touchdowns or yards they’d have if not for penalties.”
It’s prompted Tanner to go through the film, show his team their per game averages with penalties and per game averages without penalties.
When he does so, he’s transparent about the impact the ’22 loss had on him. He made promises to himself that day that he’d do things differently. Even with this group he’s directly referenced that loss to Huntington, using it as visualization tool.
“I forgot what week it was in the regular season but I went back and made a cut-up from that game, the ’22 state championship game,” Tanner said. “It had to do with details whether it be penalties, turnovers, behavior or responding after something negative happens. It was somewhere after a game where we had struggled with some of that. We had some behavior penalties and just some uncharacteristic stuff. It was a cut-up of about 20-25 plays and I went into detail of what happened during the play and why it happened.
“If you’re a common fan you can’t always spot small stuff like how a kid is behaving after something bad happens but if you’re around them every day you know. Just showing things like that and in that film the score was 7-3 with one minute left in the third quarter. In that moment you have 13 minutes to potentially be a champion for the rest of your life and leave a legacy in that community. We talked about nipping it in the bud but that was like Week 6 or 7 here. I didn’t want to get to this point now and not have addressed it. I felt like it was like God saying, ‘Alright Nate, are you going to address it or keep pushing it back and pushing it back?’ As a coach in ’22 I probably did that some. I allowed things to happen without putting a hammer on it and fixing it. We watched the cut-up and the kids learned from it and I think it’s been pretty good.”
For both Tanner and this Princeton team, Saturday’s state championship matchup with Nitro is a culmination of three years worth of successes and failures. The most accomplished senior class in program history gets one more shot at an elusive title alongside a coach that’s felt their pain even if he’s a new face to them.
Together they have an opportunity to say they learned from their past struggles and found redemption in Charleston.
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