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MOORESVILLE Tonight, Lake Norman coach Scott Sherrill will try to go home again.
He'll take his unbeaten high school football team to Huntersville to play one-loss North Mecklenburg, his alma mater.
"I haven't really thought about it," he said. "Or, I have put it out of my mind. I'm sure there will be some emotion for me stepping back into Valhalla, or 'Viking heaven' as we used to call it."
Sherrill, 46, was a starting offensive lineman for North Mecklenburg from 1979 to 1981, playing under the legendary coach Will Campagna. He played on the best team in school history in 1979, a squad that had an unbeaten regular season and players who later competed collegiately at Georgia and South Carolina.
Shortly after graduating from Gardner-Webb in 1985, Campagna offered him a job coaching the offensive line. Sherrill stayed as an assistant coach for 10 years and said he was "overwhelmed" when he was given the head coaching job.
And when he started as head coach in 1998, North Meck had made four playoff appearances in school history, none since 1992. Sherrill said it was personal to rebuild his school.
"At the time," he said, "it was my dream. My first head job. I wanted to do so well so badly."
By the end of the 2001 season, Sherrill's Vikings were 28-17 and coming off back-to-back playoff berths. But a new school was opening in Mooresville that was the same 12-mile drive from his house in Cornelius that North Meck was.
"I felt the itch to move on," Sherrill said, "to see what another school was like and another school system. I wanted to try my hand at starting a brand new program. It was a chance I was willing to take."
In the fall of 2002, Sherrill's first Lake Norman team lost its first game 48-8 to Hopewell, then coached by Mike Bradley (Bradley coaches North Meck now). The losses came in bunches. Lake Norman was 2-20 its first two years and three of its first five seasons ended with only one win.
But the Wildcats are 5-0 now and 12-5 in the past two years.
"It's been a long tour," Sherrill said. "Some of the coaches I have now have been with me the whole time. It's been a good reward for them and for me to ride the ship that long and wait for something good to happen."
Like tonight. This is probably the biggest game Lake Norman has ever played. There will be big crowd and the game almost certainly will help determine a conference champion in the new I-Meck 4A. North Meck's class of '99 is having a reunion, Sherrill said, and many of the players he coached from that team plan to attend to watch their guy - on the other side of the field.
Sherrill's not sure how he'll feel. Gosnell White has some idea. White was a superstar basketball and track athlete at West Charlotte. He started his basketball coaching career at Harding, coaching against his old high school coach Charles McCullough.
"It was extremely hard to be on that visitor's side," said White, now coaching at Union County's Marvin Ridge. "I was so nervous the first time. It was just so different. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And I would guess this is probably a little more difficult than (Sherrill is) letting you know, too."
Unlike White, Sherrill's high school coach won't be on the other sideline. Longtime North Meck athletics director Leroy Holden, who's always been the face of Vikings athletics, isn't there anymore, either. The school has undergone renovations and doesn't look the same. Still, Sherrill is starting to feel the emotional tug of going to a place he loves so much - and trying to beat the team that plays there.
"You want to go back to your old town and leave your mark so to speak," Sherrill said. "But that's for the players to decide really, and hopefully we can go back and play well."
