Another county football matchup is on the docket for week five of Friday night lights. Friday Crawfordsville will make the 10-minute trip just south to take on the Southmont Mounties. Crawfordsville comes in with a record of 0-4 (0-2 SAC) after a 51-0 loss to Danville a week ago. The Mounties on the other hand got a dominating 42-6 win over Frankfort to improve to 3-1 (1-1 SAC) on the season.
As in all county matchups, the records, stats and everything else of the sort doesn’t matter. The two rivals squared off a year ago and the Cville held Southmont scoreless in the second half, but the Mounties hung on to win 27-13.
Both coaches have the same mentality heading into the anticipated county matchup.
“Our kids don’t need any extra motivation this week,” Crawfordsville coach Brad Clark said. “Friday is the first of two chances these next two weeks for our guys to go out there and compete against kids they’re good friends with, compete against in other sports and so on. It’s always fun for each of the communities and the schools whenever you have a county rivalry happening.”
South coach Desson Hannum echoed Clark when talking about his teams preparation this week.”
“This will be our seniors last county game of their careers,” Hannum said. “For these guys they want to go out with a win after coming up short against North. We’ll have to be locked in and ready to play from the opening kick off and are going into Friday looking to play our best and cleanest football of the year.”
Both teams philosophies are pretty different. The Mounties as typical are a smash mouth football team and it starts up front with their experienced offensive line. Running behind that o-line is senior fullback Wyatt Woodall who had toted the rock 41 times this season for 470 yards and already 10 touchdowns. Senior signal caller Nolan Boyer is 21-40 (52.5%) on his passes for 249 yards.
The Athenians love to go to the air behind senior QB Kaden Patton. Patton on the year is already 53-117 (45.3%) for 667 yards and three touchdowns. He does have nine interceptions, four of which came last week. Senior wide-out Ethan McLemore is one of the best in the SAC with 21 catches for 335 yards. Junior Sam Minnette has also hauled in 14 passes for 141 yards.
“They’re big and physical,” Clark said of the Mounties. “There’s no secret that Wyatt Woodall is a great player. He’s one of the best players in the conference and one of the best we’ll see all season. We’ve been really focused on gang tackling all week and having a lot of guys to the football. That’s what it’s going to take to stop that run game. We’re going to have to try and force them to do things they’re uncomfortable with if we’re going to be successful.”
Hannum noted how his Mounties are prepping to defend against the Athenian pass game.
“They’ve had some success being able to throw the football around,” Hannum said. “McLemore and that offense have been able to get some big plays down the field. McLemore is going to definitely be deserving of some attention, but they have other guys who can catch the football too so it comes down to us playing sound defense and being aligned correctly.”
The matchup on Friday will also be homecoming for the Mounties. You can catch a live broadcast of the game on 106.3 WCDQ beginning at 6:30 with Jared McMurry and Codey Emerson.
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