Pioneer football returns to action: WCHS hits the road to face White County
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Wins have been hard for both the Warriors and Pioneers to come by through the years, and in fact were impossible for either team to come by during the 2002 season.
But while the Pioneers are still looking for their first victory of the 2003 campaign, the Warriors — who will play host to Warren County tonight at 7 p.m. — have already begun to see the benefits of their past rebuilding years.
The Warriors, who last faced Warren County in the 2000 season opener, have won just five games since that contest. But two of those five have come this season, with victories over Tullahoma in Week 0 and a win over Lawrence County last Friday night.
“Last year, they didn’t have a single senior on the team,” said Warren County head coach Gerald Tidwell, who was in attendance at the Warriors’ game last week. “Now all those kids are back. They have 11 offensive and 11 defensive starters return this year.
“They paid their dues last year, and this year through continued hard work, it’s paid off for them.”
With a balanced passing/running attack, the Warriors opened their season with a narrow 28-27 win over Tullahoma, then came within an eyelash of an upset against neighboring rival Cookeville, who prevailed 30-26.
Last week, fullback Dell Lewis came through with a pair of fourth-quarter TDs, and quarterback Josh Lowery connected with B.A. Young to propel the Warriors over Lawrence County, 20-17.
“We were most impressed with the fact they’ve got 31 kids, 10 through 12, and a good half of them are legitimate high school football players,” Tidwell said. “They’re numbers are down, but the kids they play — their best 20 or 25 — are as good as and better than the people they’re playing.”
To try and stop Sparta’s attack, Tidwell said the Pioneers will be concentrating on preventing big plays.
“Versus their personnel, we don’t want to play the man the way we’ve been playing, because they’ve got some good receivers,” he said. “We want to put more safeties back to help on the deep pass, and pretty much invite them to throw underneath, where hopefully we can make the tackle.
“We don’t want to get beat deep, because they like to drop back and throw it as far as they can down the field. They’ve big-played everybody so far this year, with at least one long touchdown pass in every game.”
With two weeks of practice since their last outing — a 47-0 shellacking at the hands of Chattanooga Central — Tidwell said the Pioneers have worked on honing their option-oriented offense.
“Offensively we’ve practiced, practiced and practiced running the triple option,” he said. “(Against Chattanooga) we ran it a lot, and it seemed like we ran up the middle all the time. But we had some problems. Either our fullback was hitting the wrong hole, the quarterback was giving the ball instead of pulling it, things like that. So we’ve spent a lot of time working on it.
“We also are trying to create ways to get the ball into Heath Crisp’s hands. Because when he touches the ball, good things happen.”
Crisp, a junior, has so far been the only Pioneer to reach the end zone, doing so on a 67-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Josh Paz in Week 0 against Livingston Academy.