Rockies renew old rivalry on Friday
Photo by Sue Garrity
Story courtesy of The Pilot News
PLYMOUTH — It’s the final week of the regular season for high school football and Plymouth’s Rockies will renew a meeting with an old rival to close out the year.
For the better part of a decade, the matchup between Plymouth (2-6) and Concord (4-4) was pretty much the NLC championship game. This year it’s far from that but it does have importance to Adam Handley’s team.
“They’ve had some close games with really good teams,” said Handley. “Their record doesn’t show how good they are.”
“We’ve been talking all week about how if we win we are tied for fifth place,” he said. “You look where we were last year and where we are this year, we have a chance to play for fifth place in the conference. No, we aren’t playing for a conference championship. If we were in that discussion we’d be ecstatic but we aren’t at that point. To play for fifth place lets us see where we are as a program and continue to improve every week.”
Last week the problems with capitalizing in the red zone continued to be a difficulty.
“All week we’d been practicing goal line stuff and short yardage goal line stuff trying to put our guys in situations where their backs are against the wall,” said Handley. “Giving them situations where we’re down by 12, down by 20 just trying to get them in situations that they might find themselves in on Friday night. We just haven’t found a way to finish things and score on those.
Penalties have been a big part of the problem as drive killers.
“We had four (penalties) of them that were false starts,” said Handley. “Two of them the center just didn’t snap the ball. The other two, one was on a wideout the other on a running back.
“Those aren’t aggressive penalties,” he said. “A holding call or two I’ll live with those. Those are aggressive mistakes, but false starts, we can’t have those. They are mental mistakes and we have to fix them.”
One thing that Handley is encouraged by is the development of quarterback Exzander Ramirez.
“I like the way Exzander is throwing the ball the last few weeks,” said Handley. “He’s throwing with more conviction, more confidence. That is one of the parts of our game that we just have to continue to improve on. We continue to throw in different variations of our passing concepts trying to give him more success.”
In many ways, the Minutemen and Plymouth are similar in what they want to accomplish and how they try to do it on offense.
“They have a really good quarterback (Bo Brunner), said Handley. “He’s young but he’s good. Very athletic. They use him very well. Similar to what we do with Exzander. A lot of the things that we do offensively they do so our defense is kind of looking at a mirror.”
“It’s going to come down to staying mentally focused in the game and execution.”
