Lions embrace confidence, look to earn playoff berth

Coming off a 45-16 rout of Two Rivers last week, Jessieville hosts Danville tonight at Don Phillips Field as the Lions push for a playoff berth.

After starting 6-0, the Lions (6-2, 3-2 3A-4) are now playing catch-up to earn their place in a Week 11 game.

“We feel pretty prepared,” Jessieville head coach T.J. Burk said of his team’s mindset. “We’ve had a good week of practice, and we talked to our guys today about doing some film study on their own. Hopefully they’ve done that, and we’re prepared for anything that they throw at us.”

Burk and his coaching personnel encourage confidence — a characteristic required if the

Lions squad looks to seal a spot in the Class 3A playoffs.

“We try to preach to them to be confident in what we’re doing,” said Burk. “I think they’re hungry to play in the playoffs; we’ve missed it the last two years, and we’re ready to get back there. We’re not for sure in yet, so we’ve got to take care of business to get in and make sure we do our part, so that we don’t have to rely on somebody else winning down the line. We’re just going to try to do our part and put ourselves in the playoffs.”

While the visiting Little Johns (4-4, 2-3) bring considerable size to the line of scrimmage, Jessieville will rely on its defensive corps to make

stops while keeping Danville’s playmakers clear of the red zone.

“I think they’re going to try to run the ball right at us,” Burk added. “They have us outsized on the line by a pretty good margin, so we would expect them to run the ball, try to control the clock and run it down our throats. They’ve got some kids … the running back and the quarterback are pretty fast, so we’re going to have to be able to get them down, tackle them in space and then try not to give up too much of a push to their big offensive line.”

Burk and his players set sights on the Danville duo of sophomore quarterback Lawson Wilkins and junior running back Gabe Stanley, who fueled a close call with Baptist Prep last week. The Little Johns ultimately fell to the Eagles, 43-42.

“Their quarterback and running back are pretty agile, and they’ve carved some other teams up running the football,” noted

Burk. “Even in last week’s game, they ran the ball really well against Baptist Prep, so we’re going to have to do a good job of shutting them down.”

A daunting 42-14 loss to Danville a year ago has given Burk and his players the task of getting on the scoreboard early while enforcing their defensive mindset when met with the Little Johns’ run-heavy offense.

“Last year they were able to jump out on us early,” he added. “I think it was 42-7 or something like that at halftime, so they made some big plays, jumped out on us early, and we just weren’t able to recover from it. We can’t give that up early in the game; we can’t put ourselves behind [where we] have to play the catchup game. Like I said, they’re good at running the football, and they can keep it away from you for a really long time if you let them get ahead.

We can’t put ourselves behind early; we’ve got to stay ahead and hopefully it turns up different than it did last year.”

With a few injuries still hindering the Lions’ lineup, Burk is encouraged by the depth that his team will obtain as the junior high athletes join the varsity ranks for tonight’s game.

“Everybody’s good except for the ones we’ve been missing pretty much half the year,” he said. “Everybody else is expected to go tomorrow night. The junior high guys get done tonight, and we’ll add a few of them to the roster tomorrow, so we may have a little bit more depth than what we’ve had. Hopefully we can just roll with it; it should be a good football game.”

Kickoff is set for 7 p.m.