For the first time in 24 days, Eastern Alamance played in a football game Monday night.
When COVID-related issues struck the Eagles program, the team was forced to quarantine and miss three straight Friday nights under the lights.
“The thing is that we had prepared a week, a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and we found out on Thursday that we were going to be in quarantine and not able to play (Southern Alamance) the next day,” Eastern Alamance coach John Kirby said of the team’s postponed Aug. 27 game against Southern Alamance. “It’s hard. My advice to everybody out there: you better enjoy the ones you can enjoy, because you just don’t know. Two weeks in a row, we found ourselves riding over to Western Alamance and Williams, watching the game with a sick feeling because your team’s not playing.”
“It was good to get the kids back,” Kirby said.
Now, it’s right back into the fire as the Eagles head to Mt. Hermon on Friday night to take on an undefeated Southern Alamance team — in a rescheduled game from Week 2 — that has produced prolific results in the run game through its first three contests.
Southern Alamance is coming off a 40-14 victory at Western Alamance last Friday, in which the Patriots ran for a staggering 428 yards on 48 carries as a team. That averages out to 9.1 yards a carry.
“We're a matchup problem when we get all the right kids. Any offense tries to present a matchup problem for people,” Southern Alamance coach Fritz Hessenthaler said following the victory against Western Alamance. “If we do things right, we're a matchup problem. But if we don't, then we're not, and that's that's true of any offense at any level. It’s still early; we just finished (our third game) and, gosh, we got a long, long way to go to improve.”
Friday’s performance wasn’t an outlier for the Patriots offense. Through three games, the Patriots (3-0) are averaging 384 yards a contest. The Patriots piled up 401 rushing yards in the season opener against Eden Morehead before running for 315 yards two weeks ago at Williams High School.
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The run-heavy style of the Patriots offense is one that relies on making the right reads and offensive lineman knowing their individual responsibilities each play. Hessenthaler credited his coaching staff for teaching players a dynamic offense that has defenses struggling to come up with answers.
“My coaching staff, I'm the worst coach on the staff, so that's just the way I feel,” Hessenthaler said. “I’ve got great guys that are great teachers. I'm just the old miserable guy that tries to keep everybody straight.”
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Now, the Eagles (1-1) are the next in line tasked with trying to slow the Southern Alamance offense down.
“What they do is very unique and they’re very, very good at it,” Kirby said. “It reminds me of Southern Nash. You can try to prepare, but I’m not sure that we got the guys to prepare ourselves for what we’re going to see.”
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These teams last met in the 2019 season, where the Eagles came out victorious 40-20. In that game, the Eastern Alamance defense held Southern Alamance to 119 rushing yards on 31 carries. The season prior, Southern Alamance, rushed for 503 yards on 58 carries, en route to a 54-34 victory in Hessenthaler’s first season as the Patriots coach.
Suffice to say, how well the Patriots are able to run the ball should be an important factor, like it usually is, in determining the game’s final outcome.
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David Kehrli is a sports reporter at the Burlington Times-News and USA Today Network. You can reach him at david.kehrli@thetimesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @DavidKehrliTN. Subscribe to the Burlington Times-News here.
This article originally appeared on Times-News: Now back at it, Eastern Alamance tasked with defending Southern Alamance’s prolific run game Friday night
