HS Trojans look to take down Badgers on road
Hot Springs is looking for its first win against Arkadelphia since 2015 as the Trojans visit Badger Stadium tonight.
The Trojans are 1-7 against the Badgers since 2010, falling to them 49-0 in 2017, when Arkadelphia won its first of back-to-back Class 4A state titles.
“I keep saying that they’re winners,” said third-year Trojans head coach Darrell Burnett. “They know how to win. When you know how to win, you’re not going to do anything to beat yourselves. You’re not going to see a lot of turnovers, unless we play harder than them and create a lot of them. You’re not going to see a lot of … negative first downs — things that beat yourselves when it comes down to the fourth quarter — interceptions, fumbles, little things. But they’re a championship team. They’re a championship team that knows how to win, and they expect to win, know how to win, and we’ve just got to come in and make sure, basically, that we don’t beat ourselves.”
The Badgers, who are coming off a 21-20 overtime win over Camden Fairview last Friday night, are playing under a new head coach for the first time since 2011. J.R. Eldridge, who led the team to its first state championship since 1987, took over as the head coach for North Little Rock in April.
First-year head coach Trey Schucker, who was offensive coordinator at Searcy until he was hired in May, does not seem bothered by the Trojans.
“Hot Springs, they’re really athletic,” he said. “They’ve got some really good athletes and (are) really well coached. It should be really good game on Friday.”
The Badgers struggled with penalties last week, putting them behind the chains at key moments, which is something Schucker and his staff has emphasized in practice this week.
“We’re going to worry about doing what we do and making sure that we’re able to execute the plays that that’s called, trying to minimize penalties from last week and execute our passing game a little bit better this week,” he said.
Burnett said that while the Badgers do have a new coach, that does not mean that they are playing slowly or are weaker than they have been the past several years.
“He did a great job of making sure his kids understand what’s going on,” he explained. “They don’t do a lot. If he was a first year guy, and he came in and tried to do a whole whole lot, you put too much pressure on your kids. The kids won’t know what they’re doing and they’ll play slow, but he’s got it to where his kids are playing fast. They’re playing aggressive. They’re athletic. They don’t have that many kids; most of the kids are going both ways, but he inherited a winning program, man. He’s done a good job. He did a great job in the scrimmage. He did a great job against a very athletic Camden (Fairview) team. We’ve got to come out and ball out. We’ve got to do everything right.”
Burnett said that while his Trojans have had three extra days to work since facing Bryant’s junior varsity squad last Tuesday, the focus was not on Arkadelphia but on themselves.
“All I can say is for those extra days that we had, we worked on ourselves,” he said. “You wanted to work on Arkadelphia, but at the end of the day when we went against Bryant JV and then we went against Glen Rose, and if we’d performed real good, we could have said, ‘OK, let’s go ahead and start working on Arkadelphia,’ but it’s a lot of stuff that we had to fix — special team, depth chart, moving guys around, little things.”
Schucker said that he is excited to see what his team can do this week as they prepare for the 4A-7 conference, one of the toughest in the state.
“The 4A-7 is the toughest conference in 4A,” he explained. “We try to schedule nonconference games to test us, and get us ready for our conference opponents. We want those non conference games to kind of look like some of our better conference opponents.”
Both teams are mostly healthy, but junior Deshawn Roberts could be benched after a minor injury during practice this week.
Kickoff at Badger Stadium is set for 7 p.m.