Jackets to play home opener Thursday night

Friday night was going to be a busy one at Calhoun High School regardless.

Now it may be crazy with the amount of people expected to be at Phil Reeve Stadium for the Yellow Jackets’ playoff game against Blessed Trinity, but it was going to be special anyway because it was the

Calhoun boys basketball team’s home opener.

Note the word was.

The Yellow Jackets will instead push their basketball home opener up 24 hours and play their first game in the friendly confines of their own gym 6 p.m. Thursday against Woodstock instead of Friday.

“Woodstock couldn’t have been more gracious,” Calhoun head boys basketball coach

Vince Layson said. “When we called them and told them what was going on, they were very accommodating and said they would definitely work with us and play the game on Thursday. And we can’t thank them enough for that.”

He said he and his players were worried the game was going to be canceled and having not yet played while just about everyone else has, that was the last thing they wanted.

“I know the players were very excited (Monday) morning when we told them that the game was going to be on Thursday,” Layson said. “Like everybody, they wanted to be at the football game Friday night to cheer on their friends and they didn’t want the game canceled. My concern was that, we

might be moving the game to Saturday and we didn’t want that, so we’re thrilled to not only be playing, but playing on Thursday.”

Moving the game to Thursday also meant they were playing the first two games of the 2021-22 campaign were about 28 hours apart, but Layson said that is okay.

“This something we we really deal with on a yearly basis because we’ve always got a few football players we are waiting on,” Layson said. “And that’s okay because we are definitely cheering them on. But if we had not been able to move the game, it would have been a logistics nightmare with the amount of people that are expected to be at the football game.

“And we didn’t want to compete with that. We want to play our game and then go cheer on the football team because quite a few of their players are also basketball players and these guys want to go and cheer for their teammates. So we’re glad it’s all been worked out and we’re looking forward to this first week and playing a couple of games and seeing if we can get off to a good start.”

The team traveled to Kennesaw Tuesday night to play Harrison in their first game of the year. (Details were not available at press time).

The team did not have any scrimmages so their game Tuesday night was Layson’s first look at his team against a different opponent so he was anxious to see how his team looked against someone else.