Corey Jenkins has spent a lifetime circling back to Dreher, and now he’s taken the Blue Devils somewhere they hadn’t been in more than 30 years.
Last Friday, Jenkins guided Dreher to a 20-19 win over Wilson in the first round of the Class 4A playoffs, giving the ninth-seeded Blue Devils their first postseason victory since 1994. That win also set up a trip to face top-seeded Hilton Head Island (9-1) this Friday night.
For Jenkins, now in his fifth season coaching his alma mater, the moment landed hard.
“You get the monkey off your back,” Jenkins told The State. “It was very refreshing and a little bit overwhelming.
Just kind of surreal looking at it like, you know? Who would’ve ever thought we’d be at this point where we are now?”
The significance of the victory reaches all the way back to Jenkins’ own playing days. The last high school game he ever played was also Dreher’s previous playoff win, a 21-14 first-round victory over defending state champion Cheraw in 1994. Jenkins had broken his leg in that game after a season full of stress fractures, and an ambulance rolled onto the field while the Blue Devils were protecting a 21-0 third-quarter lead.
Jenkins asked the doctor if he could return. The answer was no. He stayed anyway, refusing to leave until the game ended, and only then did the ambulance take him to Baptist Medical Center.
That was the end of his high school career. It also marked the start of a long drought for Dreher, which lost 15 straight playoff games after Jenkins left school. When he arrived as head coach in 2022, the program had missed the postseason in each of the previous three seasons.
The early results were uneven. Dreher missed the playoffs in Jenkins’ first year, then won 10 games across the next three seasons from 2023-25 and reached the postseason each time. The progress came slowly enough to invite doubt, but Jenkins brushed that aside.
“I don’t ever feel pressure because I know what I’m doing,” he said. ”Some people may beg to differ, and that’s fine.”
This season finally brought the kind of breakthrough Dreher had been chasing. The Blue Devils have eight wins for the first time in nearly three decades, and they are one victory away from a milestone the school hasn’t touched in generations.
The last time Dreher won at least nine games was a 12-1 season in 1959, when John F. Kennedy hadn’t yet begun his presidential campaign.
Jenkins said the rebuild started from the ground up.
“My first year here, we had nine starters leave before I even got here,” he added. “They had no idea who the coach was going to be.
So you talk about starting from scratch - we did. And now here it is, year five.
This senior group I got, they were eighth-graders at the time. I was able to go over to Hand (Middle School), talk with those guys and get them all to come over here.”
One of the key pieces of this team is quarterback Aiden Fitzgerald, a Lugoff-Elgin transfer who has thrown for more than 2,000 yards and 28 touchdowns. Twenty-one of those scores have gone to junior receiver Terry Cantlow.
Fitzgerald said the challenge now is keeping the group focused after a win that meant so much.
“Right now, I’m just trying to keep everybody level-headed,” Fitzgerald said. "It’s either win or you’re going home, so we’re gonna try to win every week. I mean, none of us are ready for basketball season.”
Jenkins’ son, sophomore Jasiah Jenkins, is also part of the run. A shutdown cornerback, he said the playoff win came with plenty of emotion.
“It was just a roller coaster of emotions,” Jasiah said of the playoff win. “We knew we were gonna win the game from the start. We had all the confidence, and we just went out there and performed to the best of our ability.”
The family connection runs deeper than father and son. Jasiah is the third generation of Jenkinses to live in Columbia and attend Dreher.
“My mom graduated from here,” Jenkins said. “My brothers and sisters graduated from here. I think a couple uncles graduated from here.”
Corey Jenkins’ bond with South Carolina goes back even further. He grew up a Gamecock fan and used to get into Williams-Brice Stadium on Saturdays at age 10 by selling sodas for $2 apiece. When he wasn’t selling, he would walk from his home in Arthurtown to the area around Willy-B just to hear the crowd.
Even after baseball took him down a different path and he later became a two-time junior college All-American, his college decision never really wavered.
“Guys,” he said he told coaches, “I’m going back to South Carolina.”
Now he’s back at Dreher, and the payoff is arriving in the same place his football story began.
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