Athens begins season with jamboree

Published 9:00 am Friday, August 24, 2018

While most schools in Limestone County are beginning their regular seasons tonight, Athens is starting off with a preseason jamboree.

The Golden Eagles will host Sparkman at 7 tonight, and Athens coach Cody Gross said he is looking forward to trying to get all the kinks worked out before the regular season begins next week.

“The first thing is just making sure all of our communication is good from the press box to the field as we change personnel or units,” Gross said. “We want to be able to go from offense to defense to special teams without any issues.”

Another important part of a jamboree is seeing how the players will react in their first game under the Friday night lights.

“We just want to see our guys compete,” Gross said. “We want to see them just go play and not have to think about a lot of stuff. We’re going to be pretty vanilla and basic so we can turn them loose and go play. That will enable us to see a lot of guys on film.”

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Gross said another important part of a jamboree is getting many different players some playing time and experience.

Athens will play the first half and the first offensive and defensive drive of the second half like a regular-season game before emptying the bench after that.

“We’re looking to see some of these young guys in action,” Gross said. “Some have only played freshman ball and this will be their first time playing on Friday night. In the first half, we’ll be playing a lot of guys who haven’t played very meaningful minutes on Friday nights so far because we want to see how they react in those situations. We know how a lot of (starters) react in those situations, so we might not necessarily go with a lot of them in the first half. There’s certain guys we really need to see in live action.”

Athens is one of only two schools in Limestone County playing a jamboree instead of opening up their regular season. East Limestone is the other school, as the Indians will travel to face Russellville tonight.

A few years ago, the Alabama High School Athletic Association added what is called Week Zero, which allows teams to either play a jamboree and then play 10 consecutive weeks or play a regular season game and have an open week somewhere during the season.

Gross said he sees the advantages of both options.

“I go back and forth with it,” he said. “There are times where you think it will be nice to have an open week, but in high school football, you don’t really play a lot of games anyway. Basketball plays over 30 games and baseball plays a lot, too. We’ve only got 10 regular season games. Football is now a year-round commitment. When you have that, and the guys don’t get many opportunities to play games, you hate to short them one. To me it’s an opportunity to compete against somebody else and a good dress rehearsal for what’s about to take place.”