West Limestone coach Shelby Davis hasn’t been pleased with his team’s practice performance over the last couple of weeks. He’ll get to see if that bleeds over into game performance tonight when the Wildcats host Clements in an intra-county battle.

“We haven’t really practiced very well this fall, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re worried they may not get to play,” Davis said. “I’m anxious to see what we’re going to go out there and do.”

The high school season in Alabama is 11 weeks long, with an off week included for teams. Teams can choose to not play what is called Week 0 and then play 10 consecutive weeks or choose to play Week 0 and have an off week during the season.

Clements was one of the teams that played last week, losing to Wilson 19-13, while West Limestone chose to begin its season this week.

“The last two years, we’ve had two weeks of fall camp and then it was game week,” Davis said. “With all the changes we’ve had and the not playing Week 0, technically this is our fifth week of practice. They’re ready to hit somebody other than each other and are fired up and ready to go.”

Clements coach Michael Parker said he was pleased with the effort in last Friday’s loss to Wilson, but the execution needs to be a lot better.

“We need to improve everything,” Parker said. “Some good things happened in that game, but we’ve got to get a whole lot better. But that’s the reason you play your region games later in the season, so you can fix all this stuff to begin with. We’re nowhere close to being as good as we can be.”

One of the things that excited Parker about his team is the play of freshman quarterback Jaden Gilbert, who had a touchdown in last week’s game.

“The bright spot of the night was my ninth-grade quarterback,” Parker said. “He stepped in and was a little nervous before the game, but he settled in and did a great job for us. He’s got to get better with his mechanics, but he’s got a really high ceiling.”

Davis said Gilbert is one of the things that concerns him about tonight’s game, along with Clements’ physical offensive line.

“They’ve got a young quarterback who is very athletic and very fast,” Davis said. “Up front, they’ve got three or four guys who are going to outmatch us. They looked pretty good against Wilson. They flew around to the football and were physical. This will be a good test for us coming out of the gate.”

Davis is looking forward to tonight’s test, to see if his team is ready to play after practicing so long.

“Our energy and toughness hasn’t been good,” he said. “We haven’t been practicing real physical like we did last year. Those are some things that concern me. We’ll see how we look in a game.”