The Goshen Eagles hope to improve their playoff chances this Friday night when they travel to play Central Hayneville.

For the Eagles (1-5, 1-3) to make the playoffs they need to reach the magic number of four region wins, which means the Eagles will have to win their next three games to make the playoffs.

The stretch begins with a match up with the Lions this week.

“We have been a little more positive this week,” said Eagles head coach Bart Snyder. “We have also been a little more upbeat.”

The Eagles are fresh off a defeat a week ago at the hands of Elba, the No. 1 team in the state. The Eagles turned the ball over too many times in the contest and couldn’t get anything going offensively.

This week the hope in the Eagle locker room is that they learned from those mistakes.

“The players feel like the mental mistakes cost us last week,” Snyder said. “They know what direction they need to go and we hope that’s the direction that we wills start turning towards.”

Although it was a lopsided 58-7 score for the Eagles, Snyder believes his team took a lot from it.

“We had over 200 yards of total offense, which we thought was pretty good,” Snyder said. “However we had those fumbles and interceptions that we can’t have. If we can eliminate that stuff we will be fine. We saw that there were some things with our team that if we continue to build, there is promise.”

There are some winnable games down the stretch for the Eagles, in their final three region games of the year the combined record of the region opponents is 4-14.

“Our top part of our schedule was pretty good,” Snyder said. “That’s not to say its not competitive the rest of the way. Central is an athletic, big team, while Highland Home is a good football team. We feel like we are equally matched with them, we just have to play some sound football and all of that starts on Friday night.”

Although Central Hayneville has yet to pick up a win, the Eagles feel like they are in no position to take look ahead.

“This is the only game that counts,” Snyder said. “There is no looking ahead. You have to play with what we have right here. We have to focus on ourselves and get better.”

The Eagles will have to contend with a team that is big in size and that has potential to score every time they touch the football.

“You never know what your going to get coming into a package,” Snyder said, “You never know what play they are going to run or how they are going to line up. When you get those things together like that it could cause problems.”

Kick off between the Eagles and Lions will be at 7 p.m. at Sellers Stadium in Hayneville.