Crawfordsville football coach Brad Clark noted how every game in the Sagamore Conference is a test. The Athenians suffered their first loss of the season a week ago in a 49-0 loss to Western Boone and now the task doesn’t get easier for the Athenians as they hit the road to square off against the 16th ranked team in the Class 3A Coaches Poll, the Danville Warriors. The Warriors come in with a record of 1-2 on the season after picking up their first victory in a 14-13 win over Lebanon a week ago.
“There was a lot of things last week that we didn’t execute well on against a great program in Western Boone last week,” Clark said. “Danville is the same way, they’re a great program that’s had a lot of success. For us it’s about focusing on us getting better and not concentrating too much on the opponent. There’s things that we can do execution wise and game planning wise to put us in a better position to succeed.”
The Warriors must like the Stars from a week ago feature a heavy run attack led by senior tailback Derin Sharp who is second in the SAC in rushing with 441 yards in his first three games of the season.
Junior Tanner Thompson leads the Warrior offense at quarterback and has completed just 50% (16-32) of his passes through three weeks to go along with 226 yards. Thompson’s top target has been senior wide-out BJ Wuest who has 134 yards on nine receptions.
“The thing that sticks out most about them when you watch them on film is their size,” Clark said of Warriors. “They’ve got tremendous size at all positions and that’s something you can’t really prepare for in practice. Our guys just have to be ready to play low and win their individual assignments. If we do that across the board then good things will happen.”
Offensively for the Athenians Clark took the majority of the blame for the shutout a week ago against the Stars. Crawfordsville’s defense was able to keep them in the game until around the mid-way point of the second quarter, but the CHS offense was un-able to mount much of anything to keep pace with WeBo.
“I thought our defense did play really well for the most part last week,” Clark said. “Offensively I didn’t do enough to help our defense out. This week we’ve started to get back to some of our basics and fundamentals that we want to do offensively.”
The 2-1 (0-1 SAC) Athenians and the 1-2 (1-0) Warriors will kick-off beginning at 7:00 and you can catch a live broadcast of the game on WIMC 103.9 beginning at 6:30 as Jared McMurry and Blake Largent will have the call from Danville.
