Eagles still looking for first win
Trying to build off last week’s
38-23 defeat to Magazine, Cutter Morning Star welcomes Mountain View to Eagle Field tonight for one of the last nonconference matchups of the season.
The Yellowjackets (3-1) fell to Hoxie, 47-16, on Sept. 4, but they are coming off big wins against Hector and Quitman.
“It’s hard to tell on film, but they seem very athletic,” Eagles head coach Matt Kinsinger said. “The first thing I noticed when I watched them on film was they were fast. Based off of what I see, they seem like they’ve got some good size up front. They’ve got
60 kids on the roster so they’re pretty large. … It seems like they’re still trying to figure out their personality.
“They’ve used several quarterbacks, but it seems last week they found their guy. No. 11 (junior Elijah Carlton) — he’s a good hand and a pretty good athlete. They look like they can spread it out and run spread, and it looks like they can line up some tight end or unbalanced sets, kind of come at you and play some smashmouth, so it looks like they’ve got the ability to do it.”
While Carlton will be one of the players that the Eagles (0-4) will have to contain, the Yellowjackets have multiple threats to watch.
“He’s a very athletic kid in the backfield,” Kinsinger said of Carlton. “They’ve got several kids in the athletic positions that seem like they’re pretty dangerous. Defensively, they’ve got some guys up front that looks like they come off the ball hard, and they’re physical. It looks like their secondary, their linebackers, defensive backs, are coached very well. They seem very disciplined.”
Practice looked different this week for the Eagles as Kinsinger switched things up.
“We’re still in that place where we’re just trying to continue to get better every day, honestly,” he explained. “There’s nothing extravagant, nothing out of the ordinary for us. We’re just trying inch by inch, day by day — trying to chop wood and carry water. Focus on the process, really and not so much other than that.
“I did change practice up a little bit. We’ve been working a lot more on individual skills where I can spend some more time with our kids to help expedite the learning curve here. So I did change practice up a little bit that gave us some ideas and I’ve noticed some deficiencies because I wasn’t with them in the off season, and we didn’t have a true off-season with them — just being able to do things together. Simple foundational things like agility drills, changing direction drills, speed drills and doing different things like that. Focusing on our tackling and just really basic things like what we would normally do in a spring ball scenario so we just kind of went back to basics on that.”
The Eagles will be two starters short this week, a situation that is becoming all too familiar.
“I’ve got one back from COVID, and I lost another one to COVID, and I’ve got another one that’s got strep throat,” Kinsinger said. “It’s an every week thing. I have yet to play with a full starting cast where everybody needs to be where they’re supposed to be. That’s just part of it. It’s part of being at a small school and having smaller numbers. It’s just all part of the challenges of the scenario.”
Kickoff is set for 7 p.m.