Calhoun football ready to enjoy some down time
For the Calhoun High School football team, this is a week to recoup and regroup.
They won’t exactly be taking their foot off the gas, but with no game this week before the opening round of the 5A playoffs come to town next Friday night, the Yellow Jackets can currently decelerate just a little bit.
The 2021 regular season is in the books and the guys in gold finished with an excellent 8-2 mark that included a 4-1 mark in Region 7 after a season-ending 21-14 defeat at Cartersville last Friday, giving the number one ranked in 5A Hurricanes the top seed out of the Region going into the playoffs while Calhoun will be number two.
Calhoun head football coach Clay Stephenson said the loss definitely hurt because of what was at stake.
“It stung over the weekend,” he said, “We wanted the win so badly for our seniors. They’ve worked so hard and have put in so much time that we really wanted our seniors to go out as Region champs.
“I thought we played pretty well in the first half, we just couldn’t get untracked and we made a couple of mistakes that hindered our chances to score. And then they hit on that big pass play right before halftime to get some separation. But I thought we played very well in the second half and i was very proud of the guys for the way they kept fighting and kept working hard but eventually we just ran out of time and ran out of possessions and couldn’t get the W.”
The Jackets were doing more than just trying to win a football game and a Region title last week. They were trying to ruin another powerhouse’s long streak of success in their own backyard.
The one-score victory secured a tenth consecutive Region title for the ‘Canes and they have now not lost a league game since 2011, which is a incredible string of 62 consecutive straight wins.
“Like I said, the loss stung us. No doubt,” Stephenson said. “But we’ve moved on. We’ve got a lot of football in front of us I believe and we can’t do anything about what’s happened in the past so there’s no reason to look back. We just need to look forward and work hard this week and start to get ready for the playoffs next week which I know everyone is excited about.”
So now everyone in the program — players and coaches — can take a breath and get back to some basics this week with no game on the backend.
“We’ll spend this week focusing on us,” Stephenson said. “We’ll work on fundamentals. We’ll work on a lot of the little things that we need to clean up. We’ll work on some things that we’ve got to continue to clean up. And we’ll work on just continuing to get better both individually and collectively.
“You always want to continue to improve and that is our goal every week and that includes this week even if we don’t have a game. But continuing to get better is a key part of a team being able to make a deep playoff run I believe.
“We’re at the point in the season where every week, you’re going to see a really good team with great athletes and excellent coaches and if you don’t continue to
get better, you’re probably not going to go very far. So this is a week that we have an opportunity to get a lot of work done and really focus on ourselves and we’re hoping we can take advantage of that.”
At the moment, exactly who Calhoun will face next week in the first round in the friendly confines of Phil Reeve Stadium is unknown but they are looking at either Decatur, St Pius X or Southwest Dekalb out of 5A Region 5 with all of those teams playing Friday in their season finale.
Those three teams are all currently bunched up and leading Region 5 with Saint Pius X 5-0 in the league while SW Dekalb and Decatur both 4-1 and tied for second.
Decatur is 8-1 overall and SPX is 7-2 and Southwest Dekalb is 5-4 and St. Pius and Decatur meet Friday night in a game that could very well have some Calhoun coaches in attendance to get a scouting report.
“We don’t really know a whole lot about those teams but obviously they’re all pretty good, “Stephenson said. “But
whichever one of those teams we do play, as soon as we know which one it is, we’ll get to work immediately on finding out all we can about them.”
“We as a staff haven’t exactly figured out how we’re going to handle things this Friday yet, but having two of those teams playing each other certainly helps. But once we know exactly who we are looking at playing, we’ll start preparing for that team right away.”
After Cartersville, which is 9-0 and 5-0, and Calhoun, Blessed Trinity was 3-2 in the league to finish third and Cass claimed the fourth and final playoff berth with a 2-3 record.
Those final two seedings and places were determined last Friday night when Blessed Trinity defeated Cass, 34-13.
And Hiram avoided an 0-10 season and a spot in the Region cellar by beating Woodland, 35-24, last Friday putting the Hornets at 1-4 for fifth place in the league while Woodland was 0-5 to end up sixth.