By Tom Waddill
Sports Editor
HUNTSVILLE —
Football coaches talk a lot about discipline.
“We need more discipline.”
“We’ve just got to play more disciplined football.”
“If that team had a little more discipline, they would be awfully tough to beat.”
Around the Joe Clements Field House this week, it’s the players who are loosely tossing that word around as they prepare to tackle the simple, but sometimes confounding option attack of the College Park Cavaliers.
The 2010 Hornets want to be the first Huntsville team to knock off College Park and they know they’re going to have to play 48 minutes — maybe more — of fundamentally sound, “responsibility” football to accomplish their goal.
“We’ve got to have discipline,” junior linebacker Bridge Blount stressed Wednesday after practice. “Against their offense, if you mess up one assignment they’re going to capitalize. You’ve got to have someone on the dive, someone on the pitch man and someone on the quarterback. If you mess up they’re going to take it 10 to 20 yards on every play.”
The Cavaliers can take it farther than that, Hornets head coach Shane Martin said. As defensive coordinator, he’s been on the wrong end of the last two meetings with College Park. In his second game as Huntsville’s head coach, Martin would like nothing more than to come out on top for a change.
The Hornets can do that, Martin believes, if they take care of their defensive assignments, move the football offensively and score more points than they did in a 28-2 loss to Brenham last week.
“If we play with the same kind of intensity defensively as we did last week and show up with the same kind of never-give-up attitude, we can get that first win,” Martin said. “We’ve got to score some points when we have the ball, though. If we do that, we’ll be OK. But we just can’t have as many three-and-outs as we did last week.”
With a Thursday game and a couple of rainy days forcing the Hornets to shift into overdrive, center Danny Murray said the Hornets have worked fast and hard this week trying to correct the problems they experienced in the season opener last Friday.
“We just had to get more disciplined on our blocking schemes,” Murray said. “We needed to get everybody on the same track, so one person is not messing up. When one person messes up, that kills the play.”
The Hornets showed some life at times last Friday, but Brenham’s speedy and strong defensive unit forced three turnovers, one that resulted in an easy touchdown for the Cubs.
“We’ve got to stay focused this week and play at the same pace as we did against Brenham,” Murray said. “We’ve also got to capitalize on College Park’s mistakes.”
Last week, the Cavaliers lost 17-16 on the road to Lamar Consolidated. Junior quarterback Zach Wright was forced into action early in the game when senior Tyler Chaumet hurt his knee.
College Park tried like crazy to overcome a 17-7 deficit, but after Wright scored on a 29-yard run midway through the fourth quarter, the Cavaliers lost a fumble deep in Mustang territory with less than a minute left in the game.
Martin said the Cavaliers have not changed much since the Hornets first faced them four years ago. College Park head coach Richard Carson has made a few adjustments to better fit his personnel, but his team’s bread and butter is still the veer offense that can explode at any time.
“They look for their fullback to bust it big, they look for their quarterback to bust it big and they want their pitch man to bust it big,” Martin explained. “They’ve got their number two quarterback in there now, but that doesn’t really matter in their offense. Wright’s a shifty little runner who runs the veer pretty well.
“They’ve also got a third-year starter (Paco Solano) at running back. He’s a pretty good runner who catches the ball well on the pitch. Their best fullback, in my opinion, is Austin Boudreaux. He’s a good blocker and he’s hard to bring down. They’ve also got some big old kids on the offensive line.
“Coach Carson does a tremendous job from the junior high up to his varsity team.”
The Hornets say they’re assignment tonight is simple, but challenging.
“Stopping the option,” cornerback Chris Burns said. “That’s the main thing we’ve got to do to win.”
