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Dustin Fry wants nothing more than a win right now for Polk County’s football program.

But he’d also settle for a bit of normalcy.

The Wolverines travel Friday to Chase for a 7:30 p.m. kickoff in a matchup of Mountain Foothills 7 Conference teams. It will be the second game this week for both teams, each having played a conference foe on Monday as teams scurry to catch up from dates postponed in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

Polk County’s last three games have been played on a Thursday, Monday and now a Friday with three days since the last game. The Wolverines have not had a normal week of game preparation since facing Blue Ridge in early September.

A three-day turnaround, though, is especially new for all involved.

“You try to pull back a little bit,” Fry said during a break Wednesday morning from preparations. “On (Tuesday), I didn’t go with pads. Today, we’re going with pads, and it will be like a combined Tuesday/Wednesday practice.

“Typically, we would be in full pads (on Wednesdays) and go probably two hours and 15 minutes. And we’ll probably end up going an hour and 30 minutes, something like that, and not be on our feet as long.”

Perhaps the biggest impact of the short week will be on Polk County’s game plan. While the Wolverines had done some preparation last week, when Polk initially thought Chase would be its first post-Helene opponent, the small interval between games means there won’t be a lot of new things on Fry’s play sheet on Friday evening.

“You can’t do a bunch of new stuff, just have to keep trying to do the things they know how to do and know what to do,” Fry said. “There’s a couple of wrinkles just to get some guys the ball, but other than that, it’s really just trying to get your work in and keeping as fresh as possible.”

Polk County coaches regularly meet on Sundays to begin preparing for the next game. When the staff gathered this week, they not only honed their game plan for R-S Central, but also started working on schemes for Chase. Fry had some experience from his college coaching career with a quick turnaround, but admits it has been an unusual time.

“I was used to it a little bit from college, playing Saturday-Thursday games and that type of thing,” he said. “You always try to get a head start, and we had already started on Chase before they moved the R-S game to Monday. So we had a little bit done on them.

“But it just condenses everything. Sometimes, that’s a good thing in that you don’t have time to chase a bunch of rabbits. It is nice not to have to wait five weeks to play after a loss. That was just like a festering sore that never closed and still hasn’t. It will be nice to go ahead and play a game.”