'Everybody's Got a Role': Inside Jay Entlich's Freshman-Fueled Columbus State Season

Columbus State fell behind 2-0 in the first fifteen minutes on the road at Rollins, the kind of start that buries a team that graduated five starters over the winter. It didn't bury this one. Head coach Jay Entlich kept reaching for his bench, so often that Columbus State finished the match having played twenty one different players. Rollins played fourteen. Final score: Columbus State 4, Rollins 2.

It hasn't always gone that way. Entlich counts two games this season where the comeback fell short, right alongside the ones that didn't. That's the tension of this roster: young, thin in spots, finding out in real time what it can survive, one half at a time. He walked through all of it with SDH Network's Jon Nelson on this week's Red Clay 1v1, from freshmen learning on the fly to a Peach Belt Conference that has never been tougher to get through clean.

Entlich isn't in the business of romanticizing comebacks. He'd rather his team stop needing them.

Building a Freshman Class Under Fire

Columbus State graduated five starters last spring, every one of them a real contributor, and Entlich knew there was no easing into what came next. So the staff didn't. They built a schedule meant to speed the process up instead.

The spring slate included games against Clemson, Auburn, Georgia State, and South Alabama, four opponents most Division II programs wouldn't touch. Columbus State also flew its young group to England for three matches against Bournemouth, Oxford, and Southampton, part of a longer running trip covered below. Nine spring games in all.

By preseason, the plan shifted from exposure to stress test. Columbus State scheduled AUM and Lee, two strong Gulf South Conference opponents, specifically to see whether a roster with eight freshmen and two transfers could hold up before Peach Belt play even started. "I don't think we've had an easy game yet on our schedule," Entlich said, drawing a clear line between his group and programs that pad their nonconference schedule.

The growing pains showed up anyway, just not the ones a coaching staff can schedule around. Al Henschel returned to the field this week for the first time in a year, having torn her ACL in last season's game against Lander and worked all the way through return to play protocol. Peyton Conti, a transfer who arrived from Georgia State a year ago, was back at training too, after roughly a month out with a preseason injury. At times this season, Columbus State has started five or six freshmen in a single match, and asked them to look like they belonged there.

"It's been a tough stretch," Entlich said. "But it's been so cool to see some of the younger players have to step up."

Everybody's Got a Role

Entlich has a theory about why so many young players lose perspective these days, and it isn't about talent. It's about what they think matters. Too many of them, he said, care more about the photo in the starting eleven than about anything they'd actually do once the game started.

He's used the same logic on his own daughter, who plays for the University of North Florida. Early on, she got upset when she wasn't starting. So Entlich asked her a question: would she rather get her photo taken in the starting eleven and play two minutes before sitting the other eighty eight, or skip the photo, get subbed on, and play a full eighty eight minutes of soccer?

He extends the same idea to his roster with a different image, one built around a concert instead of a game. It isn't really about the person playing the piano on stage, he tells them. It's about the person who carried the piano up there in the first place. No piano carrier, no show.

"Everybody's got a role," Entlich said. It's the line he leans on when a freshman is nervous in the opening minutes, frustrated about minutes, or measuring herself against a highlight reel instead of whatever the team actually needs from her that day.

A Peach Belt Getting Harder to Solve

Entlich hasn't seen every game in the Peach Belt this season, but the ones he has seen all point the same direction. The league is closer than it's been in years, and there isn't a lopsided score anywhere to point to.

Lander hadn't allowed a goal through the point of this interview. North Georgia is scoring at will on the other end. Entlich pointed to a one goal loss USC Beaufort dropped to North Georgia recently, the kind of result that could have gone either way. GCSU, Clayton State, and Lander have all lived in that same tightening middle of the table. Entlich is excited about the future of the conference, even with Flagler leaving for the Sunshine State Conference next year, with the Peach Belt poised to grow larger potentially in the coming years.

Entlich credits better coaching across the league, along with real investment in women's soccer, new fields and new facilities among more than one program, for closing the gap that used to separate the top of the Peach Belt from the bottom.

The House in Oxford

Columbus State's connection to Oxford, England predates Entlich entirely, and it has nothing to do with soccer at the root of it. Decades ago, a donor named Kyle Spencer bought a home in Oxford, now known as the Spencer House, specifically so Columbus State students could study abroad there. The university has been sending students to live in that house and take classes at Oxford's colleges for about 25 years.

Entlich's idea, back in 2010, was simple enough: the Spencer House sits empty during Oxford's three week spring break, so why not take the soccer team. Columbus State has made the trip once every four years since, the maximum the NCAA allows for something like this: 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022, and now 2026. Players complete a study abroad curriculum tied to their majors while they're there, nursing majors interviewing healthcare workers, business majors building out a marketing project, all of it running alongside training and matches.

The matches are the other half of the trip. Columbus State has played Bournemouth, Oxford, and Southampton on past trips, and the access around those games has mattered as much as the results ever did. Entlich and his staff get there early to meet with the opposing team's nutritionists, psychologists, and coaching staffs, then stay after for a meal where Columbus State's players sit down with their counterparts from the host program. Some of those relationships turn into something real: a former Columbus State goalkeeper, Heidi Harris, is now playing professionally in Australia, and Entlich is in talks with a player from Oxford United about a possible move to Columbus State.

The trip also comes with a lesson in what it actually costs to watch different levels of the same sport in England. Entlich figured it ran close to $7,000 to get thirty people into a Manchester City versus West Ham Premier League match, with good seats. A ticket to watch Chelsea play Manchester United in the Women's Super Cup, in front of 20,000 fans in Bristol, ran about $160. Same sport. Different universe.

The one restriction that actually frustrates him is that same four year rule, on top of what it costs to fund the trip every time it comes around: real fundraising, real community support, and a price gap between the men's and women's game in England that still catches him off guard, even having seen it up close more than once.

Twenty-Three Years, Still Blessed

Entlich is in his 23rd year at Columbus State, long enough to have worked under three or four different athletic directors. He credits every one of them, plus the current administration, for a level of support he doesn't take for granted. "Regardless of wins and losses, it's been a complete blessing for me," he said.

That support has been reciprocated by Entlich and his team this season in ways that have nothing to do with the scoreboard. Columbus State held a military appreciation game and auctioned off camouflage jerseys, with the proceeds going to House of Heroes. On October 3rd, the team will wear pink jerseys for a breast cancer awareness game, with the goalkeepers wearing yellow in memory of Isabella "Izzy" Sause, a Georgia College sophomore who died on August 30th at 19 years old. Sause, a pre-nursing major from Loganville, Georgia, was remembered by Georgia College head coach Jack Marchant as someone who was "always a beaming light of positivity" and "saw the best in any situation." Georgia College's tribute said she will "always be a Bobcat." Columbus State plans to make a donation to a childhood cancer cause in her honor that day.

Columbus State heads to Cochran next, to play Middle Georgia, one more line on a schedule that, by Entlich's own count, still hasn't handed his team an easy night.