In head coach Robby Jones’ last season, ACE soccer thrives in playoffs

When the ACE girls soccer team defeated Gordon Central in the first round of the playoffs last week, it was the first step in a long-awaited playoff run for a team full of seniors on their last ride.

But this postseason effort has roots that run deeper. This team found its beginnings around six years ago, when current seniors were just starting middle school and barely getting their feet wet on the soccer field.

That was when head coach Robby Jones met Lily Bivins and other players, many of whom would become leaders for the Gryphons in 2026. Jones did not forge a connection with Bivins then. She was only in sixth grade, after all. But the pieces fell into place nonetheless — several talented players were part of ACE’s soccer program, which ran seamlessly all the way from middle school to the varsity level.

“Consistency,” Jones said of the school’s soccer pipeline, “is something that matters.”

That consistency has helped Jones — across roughly a decade of coaching at ACE — build a soccer dynasty. 

The girls team has won a state championship. The boys team, which Jones also coaches, has played for one. Both teams consistently dominate their respective regions. They each earned the No. 2 seed in the Class A-Division I state tournaments this season.

Jones — and his players who flawlessly follow their fearless leader’s example — shrug off the accolades. They want to win, of course, but they are more concerned about each other. 

When Bivins scored a hat trick barely 10 minutes into ACE’s first-round playoff game, for example, her own teammates seemed more excited than Bivins was.

“We have the mentality that when one scores, we all score. You can tell that because the girls celebrate other people’s success. When you see that, you can tell that they’re true friends,” Jones said after that victory. “Yes, Lily scored four goals, but she doesn’t look at it that way. She thinks of it as, ‘my teammates put me in position to score.’”

Later, as Jones was sitting in his office with the second round of playoffs looming the following week, he considered what was at stake as the girls and boys teams both surged in the playoffs.

“I want it really bad for them,” Jones said. “And this is my last shot.”

Because as difficult as it is to trace the path of ACE’s soccer story, it is easy to picture where this chapter of it will close: Jones’ coaching tenure for the Gryphons will end after this season. He is set to become the head of school at ACE.

“It’s going to be hard. I’ll still come to games. … This job is going to be so demanding going forward, and I felt like (the soccer teams) deserved someone who is able to be there and devote more time. The students and parents deserve someone who can devote all their time, too,” Jones said. “I wouldn’t be able to give the players what they needed while still giving this building everything it needed.”

But for now, Jones is still captaining the ship. The girls team romped past Pepperell in the second round Tuesday to reach the Elite Eight, while the boys team got a clutch 3-1 victory over Social Circle to do the same. In the girls game, Bivins had a whopping six assists, positioning the ball perfectly for her teammates from across the field into the box.

From a hat trick to six assists, Bivins’ effort demonstrates a culture of teamwork that Jones has built at ACE with one oft-overlooked method: instilling tradition.

Building the culture

Tradition is hard to build when your school has only existed for two years, but it was a top priority for Jones when he arrived in 2016 after ACE was founded in 2014. It’s one of the few aspects of his footprint at ACE that he’ll openly take pride in, the one accomplishment that escapes the cloak of Jones’ humility.

Jones began a tradition where players on the girls and boys teams are awarded a coin and named “Man of the Match” after games. They then bestow the coin to a mentor, typically a parent, coach or teacher, that has helped them improve. 

These awards, more than things like wins or hat tricks, are some of the head coach’s favorite moments.

“Seeing the kids give the coin to their mom or dad, or even a physical trainer who helped them through an injury,” Jones said. “Those are moments of beauty. We’re a classical school, and we focus on the truth, goodness and beauty. And that’s a beautiful thing. That’s the most beautiful thing to see.”

Another now-beloved practice installed by Jones is “wearing the 14,” where the players vote on one player — a high-character teammate and leader — to wear No. 14 and act as an “ambassador” of the team’s best qualities.

Yet another event the players have latched onto is the “Battle for the Paddle,” a rivalry Jones kindled with Mary Persons, the school he coached before arriving at ACE. The winner each year takes home an oar, emblazoned with the winning team’s logo and the final score.

Bivins, who was voted to wear that coveted No. 14 by her teammates, echoed Jones’ sentiments about consistency.

“We’ve been together since sixth grade. It feels like we’ve been building this for a long time,” she said of her teammates after the Gryphons’ second-round win. “It’s really just about how the girls jell each game. We always jell a little bit differently.”

Jones was excited for ACE’s K-12 school structure for this reason: he could interact with players as they developed their skills. Now the teammates celebrate each others’ goals and chatter ceaselessly on the pitch, having known and played with each other for years.

The boys team is no different, with tight-knit units taking the field each year. The boys have been less dominant than the girls of late, as they had not won a second-round playoff game in four seasons until Wednesday’s win over Social Circle. That only makes them hungrier, Jones said.

So does the fact that it’s their coach’s last season at the helm.

“To a certain level you’re preparing the same way, but obviously you’re putting more effort in. I think it helps when you have extra motivation,” Jones said of it being his final year as the head coach.

The players feel it, too.

“He definitely takes it one day at a time. He doesn’t say it, and he doesn’t talk about the tournament as a whole,” senior star Kate Thomason said after ACE’s first-round victory. “But underneath, there’s always this level of excitement knowing we could go very far.”

In addition to these incentives, players are also invested because of yet another tenet of the team established by Jones: playing time.

“From when they start in middle school, we emphasize playing time a lot over winning. When you get a bunch of people excited about playing, you tend to get them to hang around,” Jones said.

That much was exemplified when nearly every player on ACE’s roster got into the girls’ second-round playoff game. The Gryphons also use much of their boys’ team roster, which consists of an impressive 25 players.

Developing talent

Friendship and participation alone do not make a dynasty, however. You need players with great instincts and true ability on the field.

ACE has that in spades. The Gryphons’ girls team has at least five players on the front end that can score seemingly at will, fueled by players like Bivins who deliver precise strikes into the box to create assist opportunities. The boys team is led by Sohan Patel, a smooth finisher who has several hat tricks this season and is still only a sophomore.

Both teams are balanced by stout defenses. Jones’ own daughter, Scout, is crucial on defense for the girls along with senior center back Mia Johnson. Henry Carter excels on defense for the boys, and DJ Fanning — who has not allowed a goal against a region opponent across his entire career— is stifling in the net.

Aside from the long-term development Jones already lauded, how have the Gryphons achieved this?

“We’re not training everybody to do the same thing. We say, ‘alright, you’re playing center forward. We need you to train to put the ball in the net.’ We then need the center back to train to be able to defend well, organize and communicate,” Jones said. “We used to kind of train everybody to do everything. So now it’s more specialized — this is your role from a tactical standpoint.”

It sounds obvious, but in an area where soccer is not as popular, many players only begin learning the ins and outs of the sport when they join a high school team. When there’s not as much prior experience, the broader basics come first instead of positional specifics.

ACE can get into the nitty gritty because of their middle school team. Jones has also run a summer camp where he gets kids into soccer.

“Mia Johnson, she’s a senior, there’s a picture of me and her when she was little. She came to my summer camp. Now she’s the center back and she’s incredibly important,” Jones said.

That long-term investment has led to the Gryphons competing at a high level. That’s another piece of the puzzle Jones is proud of: ACE schedules extremely tough opponents in the regular season, including nearby Middle Georgia teams that are several classifications higher.

The Middle Georgia Invitational, a regular season tournament the Gryphons have played in, is a great example. This year the girls team won the event, defeating Perry, Veterans and Houston County at Freedom Field in Warner Robins.

“I remember five years ago, we played (Houston County) and we were just glad we didn’t get mercy-ruled. This year we beat them 5-0,” Jones said. “We won the invitational, so Freedom Field? Now we call that Perkins Field South.”

Jones wants the tough schedule to prepare his teams for the most important games. With the first two rounds of the playoffs out of the way, this girls team — one of the top squads in the state all year — will start to face off with even more talented groups.

But Jones — the man who is jokingly called the “czar of Gryphon soccer” by beloved PA announcer Tam Smith before games — is not concerned. He has trained them for this, not just in terms of talent, but in terms of character.

“I think they’re ready in more ways than one. If we win a state championship but we’re lousy people, I have failed. We focus on character and I think it shows,” Jones said. “I think we’re ready for the challenge.”