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GREENSBORO — Four seasons ago, the football field was just a patch of mud. The players practiced on a nearby middle school baseball field. Their locker room was a trailer.

Today, the Nighthawks can advance to high school football's state championship game.

"It's just amazing how much we've grown as a team," said Northern Guilford quarterback Rocco Scarfone, one of about a dozen seniors who have been with the team since the high school first opened in 2007.

Northern Guilford (12-2) will visit Wilson Hunt (12-2) for an NCHSAA 3-AA semifinal at 7:30 p.m. today. The winner will advance to play for a state title against either Charlotte Catholic (14-0) or Boiling Springs Crest (10-3) on Dec. 11.

This is the third consecutive season the Nighthawks have amassed double-digit victories under the guidance of Johnny Roscoe, who won his 250th career game as a head coach when Northern dispatched Raleigh Cardinal Gibbons 35-10 last week. Roscoe, who spent 28 years coaching in South Carolina, owns a career record of 250-152-1, which includes the first season at Northern when the startup football program went 8-2 playing a junior varsity schedule.

"If you stay in this long enough, everybody wins 250," Roscoe said after a practice this week, sitting in a purple locker at the school after his players dispersed for the day.

Roscoe, 61, has been coaching for 40 seasons, ever since graduating from Guilford College in 1971. He retired in 2005, had a knee replaced, bought a farm. But the football field is where he belonged, helping boys grow into men. When he was contacted by Northern Guilford in 2006, the promise of building a program from scratch was far too intriguing an opportunity to turn down.

"It was the idea that it didn't exist," said Jane Roscoe, the coach's wife of 40 years. "We've never been to a school that didn't exist before. Oh, to be able to pick out everything in the locker room and the weight room and the uniforms and to go in and build a tradition ... that was the lure for him."

Roscoe, a native of Hartsville, S.C., who played defensive back for four seasons at Guilford, returned to Greensboro with impressive credentials.

Among them, he was one of the founding members and the first president of the S.C. Coaches Association and has been inducted into its hall of fame. He has also received the Amateur Football Award from the Midlands Chapter of the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame, and he and his wife are in the Guilford College Hall of Fame.

"You think you know the game when you come in, because you can play Madden, you can play NCAA and dominate," Scarfone said, "but you don't truly know the game until Coach Roscoe teaches you it."

Roscoe has coached high school football teams to three state championship games, winning one, in 1981, with his alma mater, Hartsville (S.C.) High.

He'd like nothing better than for this group of Northern seniors, the ones who started the program, to go out as state champions. It's the kids, after all, who keep him coming back.

"If I didn't have Coach Roscoe, I don't think I'd be playing football," said quarterback and defensive back Daniel Downing, who sits beside the coach on the team's bus.

Roscoe has had that type of effect on people for decades, and it's not unusual for his former players to show up at games. Roscoe was surprised a few weeks ago by a player he hadn't seen since 1976, his first season as a head coach, during Northern's first-round playoff game at Erwin Triton.

There's no telling who might show up to support their former coach at today's state semifinal at Wilson Hunt, the biggest game in Northern's short history, the biggest game the Nighthawks have played — at least until next week, if they can pull out a victory.

And if the Northern Guilford kids can go on to win a state championship?

"It'll be something. It's something really big," Roscoe said. "They don't understand. They'll come back and it'll really mean a lot more 10 and 20 years from now, because that group in Hartsville, they're 40-plus years old ...

"It's something that you can never take away."

Contact Jason Wolf at 373-7034 or jason.wolf@news-record.com