Indians push on in spring game
♦ Armuchee’s coaches get a good look at where the team stands heading into the summer.
Armuchee’s football players spent most of the last two weeks getting guidance from their coaches on the practice field. The coaches got to see how much they had absorbed on Friday night.
The Indians’ spring ended with a scrimmage against Coahulla Creek at The Reservation where Armuchee head coach Jeremy Green said he was glad to be able to assess where his squad can improve more than how many points they can score.
“I think the biggest thing we have to work on is building up trust with players,” Green said. “Use the technique we teach, read the thing we teach you to read. That’s the biggest thing — making sure you’ve got 100-percent buy-in, that nobody’s in business for themselves. Everybody’s rowing the same direction.”
It was during the Colts’ first drive that rising Armuchee junior Connor Buffington burst through the line and hammered a Coahulla Creek running back for a huge loss. On the third Armuchee drive, rising senior Jordan Morgan got some carries and made the most of them, lowering his head and pushing forward for the Indians’ largest gains up until that point.
Morgan, who also tallied a sack while playing on defense, stood out to his head coach.
“I mean, that kid was a guard two years ago,” Green said. “He’s an athlete. He was running the ball hard, and that was huge.”
On the legs of Morgan and rising senior Gauge Burkett, quarterback Devin Pledger was able to guide the Indians on a long and steady drive at the end of the first quarter, but Armuchee coughed
up a fumble in the red zone to give possession back to the Colts.
Against the larger backdrop of the spring and the offseason, Green said the scrimmage had a couple of key purposes.
“I told the kids after the game that the role of spring is to create excitement and enthusiasm, but the other thing is to find out who’s in,” Green said. “We ask them for effort and toughness — there’s going to a lot of screw-ups, but we need to see effort and toughness.”
Armuchee’s younger players made some moves in the second half of the scrimmage, with rising sophomore quarterback Kameron Parker making a 49-yard scamper and tossing a touchdown pass to Stephen Fowler to reach the end zone for the first time of the night for Armuchee.
“It was good for us,” Green said of the spring wrap-up. “We were missing three starting linemen, which is tough. I didn’t think we backed down or anything, I mean, we tried to hit them. They (Coahulla Creek) are a lot better than they’ve been.”
The Indians open up next season on the road against Murray County on Aug. 23.