Cobras fighting through injuries as season nears end

Fountain Lake has yet to find a win in conference play, and firstyear head coach Kenny Shelton hopes that his Cobras can pull together a win tonight against the Haskell Harmony Grove Cardinals.

The Cobras (1-7, 0-5 4A-7) were disappointed last week when former head coach J.D. Plumlee brought the Malvern Leopards to Fountain Lake for a 42-16 win.

“Definitely wanted to get that win,” Shelton said. “They were playing with a lot of emotions, having played J.D., but we gave them a good about a quarter and a half, and kind of beenn the same story all year, you know, the wheels fell off. It seems like when one thing happened, it just continued to snowball.”

The Cobras took an 8-7 lead early in the game before Malvern came back to score for a six-point lead. Fountain Lake went for it on fourth down around the 50, “got stuffed, and they scored right at the end of the half.”

Fountain Lake will finally get to face a run-heavy team tonight as they host the Cardinals (3-5, 1-4). The Cardinals run a Diamond-T offense that all but eliminates a passing game.

“There’s more misdirection,” Shelton said of the Wing-T vs. the Diamond-T. “There’s a little bit more of a passing threat, whereas the Diamond-T is definitely … it’s about a 98% run-oriented offense. And they’re going to get big, big splits, and they’re going to try to spread out the defense.”

Other than the minor differences, Shelton said that Harmony Grove will do many things that are similar to those that Fountain Lake does.

“Their coach is very good at running that,” he said. “He’s done a good job at every place he’s been, and they’re very disciplined. And, you know, the offense suits them, they’re going to come right at you. And they’re gonna, they’re going to control the clock and do a lot of the things that we try to do. They’re very balanced as far as who’s running the ball. Now, they are definitely run-heavy; they might only throw it about two or three times a game.”

The Cardinals run an odd-front

defense, based out of a 3-4 look.

“They’re gonna give us some different looks,” Shelton said. “We’ve got film against Bauxite, and Bauxite runs a lot of the same formations that we run offensively. So it kind of gave me an opportunity to kind of see how I think they’re going to line up to us, if they line up to us the same way they did Bauxite. That’s kind of a hard thing to do in today’s times when when a lot of teams are running the Spread; it’s kind of hard to figure out how they’re going to line up against you.”

One other thing that is in the Cobras favor is the size difference.

“This might be the only game this year where we might have the size advantage,” Shelton said. “You know, they’ve got one kid that’s around 230, 240, that’s good-sized. But besides that, they’re very similar to us size-wise. Definitely not going to be a bunch of 250, 280, 300 pound guys like we’ve seen all year.”

The Cobras are still struggling health-wise, which is always problematic with a limited roster.

“We’re about the same as we were last week,” Shelton explained. “I had one of my linemen broke his thumb in two places, but he’s still gonna be able to play. … Everything’s banged up, you know, this time of year, but definitely we’ve been more so, much more so than in years past. The injury bug has hit us early and often, so we’re far from 100%. But, you know, we are moving up some ninth graders. We do have a handful of ninth graders that we’re going to move up.”

Kickoff at Sykes Stadium is set for 7 p.m.