After months of summer practice, and going all of last season without a win, the Georgia Military Prep Bulldogs are ready to turn things around. The Bulldogs begin the 2008 football season this Friday at home against Webster County at 7:30 p.m.

Second year head coach Jon Cawley will be looking for his first win as head coach of the Bulldogs.

The team scrimmaged against Treutlen Co. on Aug. 15 and has spent the last week correcting its errors in the scrimmage loss to Treutlen.

“We went back to fundamentals last week and got better,” said Cawley.

“We fixed all of our holes from the scrimmage. It’s been night and day. We tweaked the defense a little bit.”

That tweaking came in the form of stressing it more in practice, more reps, and more time to work on it.

“The things that hurt us that we weren’t doing correctly, we weren’t squeezing, we weren’t getting our hands on, our linebackers were getting blocked, our defensive line was basically blowing up field and taking ourselves out of the play. But we got it fixed.”

Cawley said that if the team were to scrimmage Treutlen again, that they would play uch better.

Because of the dry spell in the win column over the past year, getting a win in the season opener is key to the season for the Bulldogs.

“We need this first one bad, we haven’t won a game in awhile. We need to win bad and I think we have a good shot.”

Fortunately for the Bulldogs, Webster is entering it’s first year with a varsity football team.

“They’ve got some athletes that look great. But they look like a first year team; not sure where to go, or where to line up. I think we do have an edge scheme wise against them.”

The coaching staffs exchanged game tapes last Saturday and the Bulldogs coaching staff and players have already spent nearly 18 hours watching the game tape.

“We’ve broken down every thing that they can do or possibly could do. I don’t see them being able to handle our passing game,” said Cawley who expects starting quarterback Mech Melder to prove his abilities this year.

“If you give Melder time, he’s the best in the county. Maybe area. People don’t know about him because we were 0-10 last year. But it was his first year.”