By Erik Harris
High school football teams from across the state will soon be putting the 2015 season into motion. Class 7A Hewitt-Trussville and Class 6A Pinson Valley will take the game field this Friday night, while Class 6A Clay-Chalkville will wait until Saturday for its season opener, which will lead off the inaugural Middle Tennessee Football Classic.
Week 1 slate:
Hewitt-Trussville hosts Montgomery Bell (Tenn.) on Friday at 7 p.m.
Pinson Valley hosts Hartselle on Friday at 7 p.m.
Clay-Chalkville visits Blackman (Tenn.) on Saturday at 4 p.m. The game will be played at Middle Tennessee State University.
Hewitt-Trussville will open 2015 with an out-of-state visit from Montgomery Bell Academy. Photo by Ron Burkett
Regardless of the setting, all three area teams face stiff competition this weekend. Entering Week 2 with a winning record will take a strong outing from the Huskies, Indians and Cougars.
Hewitt-Trussville head coach Josh Floyd will get his second season underway with a home contest against defending Tennessee state champion Montgomery Bell. Pinson Valley is scheduled to break in the new Willie Adams Stadium turf against Hartselle, who finished 7-4 last year.
For Clay-Chalkville, the first step in defending its 2014 state championship will land in Murfreesboro, Tenn., where Blackman (Tenn.) awaits. The Blaze ranks sixth in the initial Tennessee Class 6A poll.
“Even before the region, we’re going to find out about our ourselves,” Clay-Chalkville head coach Jerry Hood said. “We’ve got Blackman, Minor and Hillcrest, which are all super-caliber teams. The schedule is set up to prepare us for the playoffs.”
This matchup will feature some inexperience on both sidelines. Blackman must find a way to replace ten starters on the offensive side of the ball, including quarterback Jauan Jennings who is now a freshman member of the University of Tennessee football team.
The Cougars will break in nine new defensive starters against first-year starting signal caller Miller Armstrong and the Blaze offense.
Hewitt-Trussville is scheduled to face three different defending state champions—Montgomery Bell (Tenn.), Class 7A Hoover and Class 6A Clay-Chalkville—this fall. The Big Red, located in Nashville, Tenn., comes in at No. 3 in Tennessee’s Division II preseason rankings. Montgomery Bell received three first-place votes in the early poll.
“They are a team that won a state championship last year,” Floyd said. “They have a lot of guys coming back, a running back that is one of the top running backs in the Class of 2017 and a tight end that committed to UCLA last week and they are a team that was nationally ranked last year, so those are the kind of games that we’re trying to play.”
The Big Red is coming off an 11-2 season that ended with the program’s first state title since 2007. However, this year’s team must replace 2014’s Division II Mr. Football Back award winner, Cole Euverard.
“I love the competition. I think it will hype our guys up before the game,” said Hewitt-Trussville senior Jalen Williams.
Hartselle might be absent from the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s preseason football rankings, but the Tigers bring back a lot of experience this year. A young Pinson Valley offense will cut its teeth against an experienced Tigers’ defense.
Senior Jake Tiffin returns for his third season as Hartselle’s starting quarterback. Tiffin completed 65 percent of his passes for 1,842 yards and 14 scores as a junior. This game could be a shootout between him and Pinson Valley signal caller Jackie Matthews.
