A year ago, being the starting quarterback for the Vidalia Vikings seemed laughable to Landon Seyfarth.

At the time, he was a junior who didn’t have any interest in playing a sport he hadn’t participated in since AYA.

One year later, as a senior, Seyfarth became the man taking the snaps under center and in the ‘gun, leading the Vikings offensively in the 2014 season. But once he and his friends decided to play for first-year head coach Jeff Hancock, Seyfarth started the season at defensive end, and later became the starting quarterback in an unusual way.

“Well, I was throwing the football with Coach Rob (Faircloth) one day before practice, and he told Coach Hancock,” Seyfarth said.

Laughingly, Hancock confirmed the story.

“That’s true,” Hancock said. “(Faircloth) came up to me and told me that (Seyfarth) had a strong arm, so I said, ‘Alright, let’s try him out.’”

Hancock discovered Seyfarth’s potential and made him the starter by the fourth game of the season, opening up the playbook and dialing up twice as many passing plays as he did in the previous three games.

“Once I stayed calm in the pocket and started making a couple of throws, Coach opened up the passing game a lot.”

The biggest challenge came when Seyfarth had to learn a new offensive system, all the while learning the proper technique to play quarterback on a week-to-week basis.

“You have to stay focused,” Seyfarth said. “Coach gives me a lot of plays, and I look over them about an hour every day. He hands them to us after lunch, and that’s usually when I get out of school. So I would go and look over plays for about an hour, and I would have them down.”But despite Seyfarth’s emergence as a passing threat, the wins never came. At 0-9, Vidalia will end its season tonight against Buckeye, but despite the Vikings’ record, Seyfarth isn’t regretting his choice to play for Vidalia. In fact, he wishes he could have played more.

“If Coach Hancock would have been here my freshman year, no doubt I would have played,” Seyfarth said. “Coach Hancock has done a lot for this program. The wins and losses were not how they should have been this year. We have talent coming up, though. We’re losing a couple seniors, but they’re mostly young.”

Hancock said he wishes he had more time with Seyfarth, because he feels Seyfarth could have earned a scholarship to play somewhere with the development he showed in such a short amount of time.

In a perfect world, Hancock’s first season would have ended with multiple victories, wins that he feels this senior class deserves. But because they were unable to do so, seniors like Seyfarth won’t get any of the glory in Hancock’s mission to rebuild the Vikings’ program. But both Seyfarth and Hancock know it was a mentality change led by the Vikings’ seniors that will lead to a more promising future.

“Of course, I’m going to miss him, I’m going to miss all of these seniors,” Hancock said. “But I told this senior class that they are and will always be the foundation for this program.”