Troy Boeck had all day on Aug. 15 to think about leading his Marion County High School football team onto the field for the first time. The Warriors were scheduled to play two quarters in the Sequatchie Valley jamboree that night at Whitwell.

What would he say in his locker-room speech? What would be his first play-call? What could go wrong?

“I forgot about the pregame meal,” Boeck said.

Such is the learning process for a first-year head coach. Boeck and Soddy-Daisy’s E.K. Slaughter had never been head coaches before this season, but each of their teams remains alive for the second round of the TSSAA playoffs Friday.

Marion County (9-2) plays at Region 4-2A’s top-seeded Smith County (9-2) at 8 p.m. EST. Soddy-Daisy (8-3) plays at Region 2-5A champion Ooltewah (9-1) at 7 in a rematch of a game Ooltewah won two weeks ago.

Boeck is also athletic director at Marion County and was content as an assistant coach. He misses getting “down and dirty” while working with a core group. Instead, honing his organizational skills are at the forefront of his job now.

Slaughter echoed Boeck in that being a coach is no longer confined to the practice and playing fields. As for his playbook, Slaughter said he thinks he’s better at incorporating a tight end into his offense. Most of his new discoveries, though, have come in other areas.

“The biggest thing is the time you have to spend with a larger number of people,” Slaughter said. “There are a lot that you have to have relationships with. There’s so much that goes into a football program.”

Others in the Boeck and Slaughter households have had to make adjustments and sacrifices, too. Even Sundays aren’t days of rest.

Slaughter gathers with his coaching staff mid-Sunday afternoons, about an hour and a half after he meets with junior quarterback Scott Parrott. Parrott has averaged almost 220 yards passing per game this season and thrown for 30 touchdowns. He and Slaughter watch the previous game together and judge Parrott’s mechanics, footwork, reads and fakes.

“He’s been a great help to me,” Parrott said. “He’s completely changed the way I played. He’s made me a lot more aware of what’s going on on the field.”

Under Boeck’s guidance, the Warriors managed to turn an early-season negative into a positive. They started 0-2 — the second loss a 21-20 decision against eventual region champion Boyd-Buchanan in which Marion was about six inches short, Boeck said, on a conversion run with 40 seconds to play. He regrets his call against the Bucs, but not his decision to go for it.

“In previous years we hadn’t been able to play with them, and we only lost by one,” senior tight end and defensive end Jeremy Hargis said. “It seemed like after that the whole team started working harder. When we beat Tyner, it was like the whole school got behind us. Everybody’s behind us now. If you go to a gas station everybody’s asking, ‘How’s the team going to do Friday night?’ We used to get nothing. We were just another person in there.”

Boeck said there were numerous applicants when the Warriors’ head coaching job came open, but there were difficulties in finding a qualified candidate who could fill one of the specific teaching vacancies. The 1990 University of Tennessee at Chattanooga All-American wouldn’t trade things now.

“Our kids have played hard for us,” Boeck said. “They enjoy coming to practice right now. There’s excitement at school. I think it’s because they’re hungry to win. It’s been a while since we’ve been successful in postseason.”

Soddy-Daisy special-teams coordinator and defensive line coach Kevin Orr called Slaughter “the smartest football guy I’ve ever met.” Defensive coordinator Steve Garland, now in his seventh season as a Trojans assistant, said he will always have an affection for previous coach and local legend Tom Weathers, but he also praised Slaughter for the atmosphere he’s created within the program.

“E.K. is refreshing,” Garland said. “He’s not a cliche guy. He does the unexpected, be it in practice or a game. He kind of keeps everybody guessing. He’s kind of a riverboat-gambler type. It’s not all just glamour and glitz, either. He’s got an incredible work ethic.”

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