Tonight the Spring Hill Bears will travel to El Dorado to play the Parkers Chapel Trojans tonight. It will be the second time in two weeks that the teams have met. Spring Hill Coach Greg Smith hopes to bring what was learned in the first contest, the season-opener at Spring Hill, to pull a win on the road and take his team to 3-0.
The Bears enter tonight’s game “unscathed” by injury, “just bumped and bruised” but healed, according to Smith, and as for morale, “We’re at an all-time high at a 2-0 record at this point.”
This week the Bears have been working to improve on the issues that emerged in their two season-starting wins, Smith said.
Smith looks at the challenge of beating the same team twice in a season as real, but one his team is prepared for. “You never know till you take them into that environment. But we feel like we've got a good, strong senior class. We've had more seniors this year than we've had in the last few years. You expect some senior leadership to try and keep some consistency for the team, whether you're home or away.”
Playing Parkers Chapel (0-1) to a win in the first game despite a difficult first half did make clear Spring Hill had areas needing improvement. “We had some holes in our secondary, and we definitely had to fix some of those issues. We had some defensive miscues that we've tried to tune into over the last two weeks. And we learned that some of our offensive line up front has got to just do what I call, aim small, miss small. They have to actually refine a little bit more their intercept angles on our blocking schemes.”
Smith said he has respect for Parker Chapel’s coaches and players, who threw a scare into the Bears in the first half back on August 25, going ahead 22-12 in the first quarter before Spring Hill went on a scoring surge of its own and shut the Trojans out in the second half, winning 38-22.
“Oh, they're very experienced. Well coached kids. They're a very fundamentally sound program, have a tradition of winning. They're a younger football program. They have some very experienced coaches in there. Their head coach played quarterback in college at A[rkansas] State.”
A win and a 3-0 start for Spring Hill, meanwhile, would help build momentum going into conference season which will begin after the Bears’ last nonconference game against Augusta, which takes place in Spring Hill September 16. The Bears’ first conference game is at home against the Hermitage Hermits September 23.
Kickoff is set for 7:00 p.m. at Parkers Chapel Football Field at 3000 Haynesville Highway in El Dorado.