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Volunteers’ Sims: ‘We want to remember it every day’ |
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Wednesday, 04 November 2009 |
By MATTHEW STEVENS
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The easy thing to do would be to immediately forget the 2009 Starkville Academy football season.
The record books will read a record that says 0-11 with not too many positive highlights and a lot of frustrating memories.
So many people would just wipe the slate clean and hope that type of year never happens again. Not Brian Sims.
The Volunteers head coach wants everybody involved in his football program from the coaches, to the players and the fans to always remember what this season felt like.
“We want to remember it every day, remember how this went and how this felt and what went so wrong,” Sims said. “So we don’t relive it and let it happen again.”
The Volunteers will enter next season on a 15-game losing streak, which is by far the longest current streak in MAIS Class AAA play and the Vols were the only school to finish this season winless. And it wasn’t even close to getting an upset win in 2009.
Starkville Academy only got within 20 points of a team at the final buzzer twice (a pair of 19-point losses to Winston Academy and Clarksdale Lee Academy).
“It was just a lot of small things that happened throughout the season,” Sims said. “We were a young football team that had a lot of kids struggling to make the transition from junior varsity play to varsity.”
The Volunteers defense, which consisted of seven sophomores, allowed 41 points per game and only kept one team (Winston Academy) under 30 points in a game all season.
“Every one of those sophomore will be one year more experienced and hopefully they’ll know what it means to play at this level,” Sims said.
On the other side of the ball, a major injury to senior quarterback Will Goodwin at the end of September forced Sims and the offensive coaches to change not only their signal caller but their entire offensive philosophy.
In a matter of days, the Volunteers reacted to this injury by going from a primary spread passing attack to an option rushing threat led by converted junior receiver Kyle Henson.
“I don’t know many high school programs that could make that type of transition look good in that matter of time,” Sims said. “We went from dropping back and throwing it around the place to running it 50 or 60 times.”
Sims says he plans on using Henson as his starting quarterback next season and the option running attack because of the big-play athletes like tight end Adam Crittenden he has coming back that scored 14 points in four of the last five games.
“We think this type of attack can be dangerous and not to say Kyle can’t throw the ball but he’s not a drop-back passer and we don’t have one of those coming in by 2010,” Sims said.
Sims said the young kids that haven’t felt a victory since a 10-7 win at Leake Academy, need something positive to happen early in 2010 to validate the effort on the practice field that the Volunteers coaching staff saw every day this year.
“It was the most special thing because as things got more sour, all the players seemed to give just a little more in practice,” Sims said. “You want something good to happen for kids like this.”
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 07 November 2009 )
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