Ward Sutlive, sports editor and Gaby Harris, asst. sports editor
It’s often been said that change is the only constant. The Berry College Football team experienced this firsthand at the beginning of their 2026-2027 season. According to Tony Kunczewski, the head coach of the football team, 34 seniors graduated and left Berry at the end of the previous school year. This means that the current season has a great deal of brand-new faces, with over 50 freshmen joining the team. Kunczewski described the start of the season as being a similar case to most opening seasons: a myriad of different emotions.
“I think that every year there’s optimism at the beginning of the season,” Kunczewski said. “There’s also some anxious moments too, because you don’t really know exactly how things are going to happen and what adversity is going to hit.”
According to Senior quarterback Andrew Hunter, the team is currently preparing for their first game of the season, which will be against Huntingdon College. The game will take place in Alabama on Saturday, Sept. 5. Hunter regards Huntingdon as an excellent team to start the season off with.
“We’ve played them the past few years and they’re always a good week one team,” Hunter said.
Hunter believes that this game will be a good way to alleviate the restlessness that the team has dealt with recently, which has been caused by them not playing against other teams.
“I think that we’re all just ready to compete against someone else, because we’ve been practicing against each other for so long,” Hunter said.
The team has spent a great deal of time practicing for the season as a whole. A lot of that preparation has started in the weight room as the coaching staff continues to challenge the players in hopes of making the team stronger overall.
According to defensive line coach Bernard Granville, the staff recently made changes to the players’ morning routine in order to focus more on the different aspects of strength and conditioning.
“In the past, we’ve had those guys rotate through different stations such as hurdles, foam rollers, and yoga,” Granville said. “Now we’ll put them through an actual movement series, and the guys will do things like bear crawls.”
Special teams practiced field goals during a recent
intrasquad scrimmage.
The Vikings have been working all offseason in hopes for another successful season. The coaching staff has been evaluating the players all summer to see who fits best in the starting lineup. Kunczewski believes that everyone handled the preseason practice very well.
“It’s not meant to be easy,” Kunczewski said. “It’s meant to harden your team for the upcoming season, and I thought our guys handled that really well with a great attitude.”
The team was recently picked second out of eight teams in the 2026 Southern Sports Association (SAA) preseason poll. The poll is essentially a prediction done by the head coaches of the SAA to try and estimate which team will finish out the season with the strongest standing. Different parts of the team had separate reactions. Some, like Granville, feel somewhat disappointed, and plan to use this resulting poll as a way to fuel their drive to win. Others, like Kunczewski, don’t have much interest in the poll, and are focused on the season at hand.
“The games will bear everything out, so we really don’t put a lot of credence into preseason polls,” Kunczewski said. “It’s the postseason polls that matter.”
Another focus point for the team is to connect as a true unit as they gain new players and roles on the team. Granville hopes for his players to connect both on and off the field and for the connection to be displayed on the field through the team victories as a result. Granville expects there to be some challenges facing the team this year, particularly when it comes to their competition. According to Granville, they will once again be facing off against familiar and formidable opponents like LaGrange College and Carnegie Mellon University.
“LaGrange had a great season last year, and after rounding off the first three games with Carnegie Mellon, we’re really going to have to see what we’re made of before the big week,”
Granville said.
According to Kunczewski, the team has begun to form a strong bond. He believes that this is due in part to the rigorous training they have undergone in preparation for the season.
“The one thing that I feel really good about is that our team is very close knit, and I think our chemistry right now is good too,” Kunczewski said.
The purpose of that particular training period is to build resilience within the players. From Kunczewski’s perspective, his players got through that ordeal with flying colors. He was also happy to see several members take up leadership roles during that especially difficult period of time.
According to Hunter, the team is in a very interesting spot this year. He believes that some people have doubts about this new team since so many senior players have graduated. This has somewhat affected morale for the team. As a result of that uneasiness, he spoke of a type of hunger that has enveloped the players.
“A lot of people aren’t sure what we can do, which puts a chip on our shoulder,” Hunter said. “We’re going to play into that, and it’s going to make us even more hungry.”
That hunger to win also comes from the success that the team achieved last season, where they won the SAA conference championship. That victory raised the team’s already high standards, making them determined to dominate this season.
“We all know the level that we have to compete at, and that just makes everyone pull their weight,” Hunter said.
This year’s team will not only have new faces featured but also new roles filled by returning players as well. After losing a big senior class, Granville expects there will be a lot more diversity of class ranges playing this year.
“We have a good senior class this year that is going to have some success but there’s some really talented sophomores in this class as well,” Granville said. “You may even see a freshman or two on the field.”
While the team has a lot of newcomers this season, there are still many returning players excited to get back out there and make plays for the Vikings. Granville shouted out the sophomore class particularly, who will have the chance to showcase their talent more this year than last season.
“They’ve been kind of sitting behind some older players in the past, but now it’s their turn,” Granville said.
Despite what some people think, Hunter does not see the new team as a downgrade, but instead as a wave of new talent that has joined their ranks. Hunter sees a great deal of potential in these players and wants to help them succeed however he can.
The new team will be up against a variety of challenging teams as they face off against colleges such as Huntingdon, LaGrange, and Carnegie Mellon which are great competitive teams hungry for a successful season just like the Vikings. The schedule will truly test the team, particularly the young players as they will have to perform under pressure so early on in the season. The coaches continue to prepare for the challenges ahead as Granville acknowledged the difficulty of the upcoming schedule.
“There’s definitely no easy schedule and no easy team on on the schedule this year,” Granville said.
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