Rockies face #1 Concord in season-ending game at home

Story courtesy of The Pilot News. Photo by Sue Garrity

PLYMOUTH — Every Indiana football coach’s favorite time of year is the week of fall break.
“It’s only in second place to wishing every week were Blueberry Week,” said Plymouth coach Adam Handley with a laugh. “It’s really not too bad. I think the biggest frustration is they (the players) aren’t in school from 8 to 3 so we have to find other activities. We just need to keep them busy and keep them active.”
The positive is that it does give coaches a chance to do the “team building” type of things that they don’t always have a chance for in the season.
“This is the kind of season where you want that team-building stuff,” said Handley. “In the past, we’ve had that fall break during sectionals and that’s harder. If you aren’t having the season you want, you have kids at that point who may have checked out for the season and may just be ready for the season to be over. This is still week nine. We are still guaranteed another week of the season.”
The Rockies might have wanted to turn around and play on Saturday after a tough loss at Mishawaka that slipped away. Not converting on a fourth down play after a nearly seven-minute drive to start the third quarter was the point that changed the game.
“I keep talking about not converting that fourth down but there were a lot of things that you liked even after that,” said Handley. “We gave up an interception later that they returned to the three-yard line and our defense didn’t just roll over, they made them earn that score. Overall we executed a lot of things very well. We just have to do that for four quarters.”
Plymouth will be underdogs once again as #1 ranked (5A) Concord will come to Plymouth on Friday night to end the regular season.
“Some of the things Concord has shown defensively they seem like they are going to go man-to-man in coverage at times,” he said. “We are going to have to throw the ball. I think they are going to try to give us a little more loaded box than we’ve seen the past couple of weeks so we are going to have to be able to throw the easy stuff.”
“At the end of the game at Mishawaka, we were throwing the five-yard outs and the hitches, and we are going to get some funky looks that will give us fits if we can’t do that.”
Concord is averaging over 30 points a game with an offense that features their outstanding running back Jaron Thomas averaging 130 yards a game. And by the way, Thomas also leads the team in tackles on defense.
“They have a really good running back in the Thomas kid who is going to play Division One football when he’s done at Concord, and I’d probably try to give him the rock as much as I could, too,” said Handley. “They’ve based their offense around him and what he can do and when you give them a loaded box, they have some great skill guys too who know how to get open and they like to get the ball too. We have to be sure that we are sound.”
“They will give us a four front, and it’s the first time we’ve seen that in a few weeks,” said Handley. “It’s not that we aren’t familiar with it, we just haven’t seen it for a few weeks so this whole week we’ve gone back to the basics to make sure our schemes are correct. They are going to say their seven guys are better than your lineman and H and probably got man-to-man everywhere else.”
“We are going to have to convert when we need to and we will have to throw the ball at some point on Friday night.”