East getting used to Thursday games

Published 6:05 am Thursday, September 21, 2017

High school football is usually at home on Friday nights, but the East Limestone Indians are having to get used to several Thursday night games this year.

East will play its second Thursday game of the season tonight as they travel to play Lee-Huntsville at Milton Frank Stadium.

The only reason East Limestone hasn’t already played three Thursday night games is because the season opener against West Limestone was postponed to Friday night due to severe storms from the remnants of Hurricane Harvey. East will play its fourth Thursday game of the year in the regular-season finale when the Indians host Tanner.

East Limestone coach Jeff Pugh said the East-West game was scheduled Thursday to maximize gate revenue while the Tanner game was scheduled for Thursday in order to give the Indians an extra day of rest before the first round of the playoffs. However, he didn’t expect to have to play two Thursday games in region play due to Huntsville’s stadium situation.

Huntsville schools share several stadiums in the city, and some have to play games on Thursday night due to scheduling conflicts. East had to play Mae Jemison on Thursday two weeks ago and will play Lee tonight.

“It makes it tough on you, but I understand they’ve got a stadium situation over there where they have to play on Thursday night,” Pugh said. “It just so happened that we hit two of them.”

It makes for a busy week for the East coaches and players.

“It gets a little bit hectic knowing you have one less day (to prepare),” Pugh said. “It’s good that we do bring (the players) in Sunday after church and go over film. That helps us a little bit. But it’s one less day of prep. (Wednesday) is a day you don’t want to go out and do anything contact-wise where they’ll be sore. Yesterday we limited contact a little bit too.”

East won an important Class 5A, Region 8 game against Ardmore last Friday to even its region record at 1-1, and the team will have just as important a game this week as they look to remain in good shape in the race for the playoffs.

Lee defeated Russellville 45-0 in its region opener two weeks ago before losing to Brooks 23-0 last Friday.

“This one is very important because if you look down the road at our region schedule, we have Brooks away, and that will be a tough contest there,” Pugh said. “We still have Russellville, and Lawrence County is doing well this season, too. We can’t mess around and lose a region game we have an opportunity to win. We don’t want to put ourselves in a situation where we have to beat Brooks on the road in order to get in the playoffs.”

East Limestone defeated Lee 22-20 last season, and Pugh is expecting another close game this year.

“They’re in the same situation as us (1-1 in region play) and they’re going to be getting after us. They are very talented. They run the ball well, and defensively, they’re big up front, fast at linebacker and very fast in the secondary. We’ve got to take care of the ball and finish drives. If we don’t, we won’t have a chance.”

East Limestone will also have to clean up its special teams play. In last week’s win over Ardmore, the Indians lost a fumble on a punt return, kicked a 1-yard punt that gave Ardmore the ball at the 8, muffed a kickoff that led to bad field position and allowed Ardmore an 89-yard kickoff return to the 1.

“The bad thing is, we work on special teams every week,” Pugh said. “But we’ve really worked on it this week. We didn’t do well kicking off or punting the ball, and gave up a long kickoff return almost for a touchdown. It’s a game of field position, and we definitely lost that battle last week. We’ve got a lot of room for improvement.”