Purvis’ first-year head coach Brad Hankins has a plan to stop the Oak Grove offense Friday night. It’ll be a challenge for the Tornadoes to stop quarterback John Rhys Plumlee and the Warriors’ attack, but Hankins has formulated an idea to hold them down.
“We’ve put in a package and we’re going to play with 12 on defense this week,” Hankins joked. “I talked with (Oak Grove) coach (Drew) Causey and he told us we could play with 12, but I’m not sure if we could pull John Rhys’ flag if we had 12 out there.”
What Hankins didn’t say was what he had to give up to get Causey to agree to 12 players on defense.
“We’re going to let him do that and he’s going to give us a script of all the plays they’re going to run,” Causey said, adding to the joke. “He’s got to run them one through 50.”
The Warriors began the 2017 meeting between these two with their jumbo package. Three defensive players moved the ball down the field easily with the unorthodox formation, and Casey said he has something planned for that.
“We’re going to start off in the wishbone this year,” Causey said. “Me and coach Hankins talked and we both decided we’re going to start off in the wishbone and see what happens.”
Joking aside, Oak Grove is primed for a big year on the gridiron while Purvis has to replace a ton of offensive production. After a couple of weeks of practice, Hankins believes he has his starters, though.
“We’ve got those guys some reps and got them some work,” Hankins said. “We kind of feel like we know who we’re going with in the first ballgame.”
The Warriors, on the other hand, return a ton of star power. Plumlee is back slinging passes and making plays with his feet, junior Brandon Hayes’ speed will be on full display this season at receiver, senior Jack Harris lives in opponents’ backfields and senior Jarius Reimonenq returns to patrol the center field on defense.
Purvis will trot out senior Mason Kendrick to play quarterback this season. He’s been a defense-first player for the Tornadoes the last couple of seasons, but he’s filled in as signal caller because of injuries during those seasons as well.
Kendrick isn’t a stranger to the quarterback position.
“Mason was our fulltime starter as a sophomore when Ty (Howell) got hurt,” Hankins said. “He started the last six games of the season for us, so he’s been in the grease before and knows what we want to do. He does a great job of handling our offense.”
The Tornadoes has taken a hit at running back. Not only did they have a 1,000-yard rusher graduate, their scheduled starter for 2018 will be out a couple of weeks. Hankins said it’ll be running back by committee to start the season, and sophomore Wayne Ray leads that committee currently.
The two teams didn’t play jamborees so there isn’t any film on either team. That makes it a little more difficult to prepare for the game, but there is a common denominator – Oak Grove defensive coordinator Larry Dolan. Hankins was an assistant for Dolan when he was the head coach at Forrest County AHS.
“He’ll do a great job and they’ll be prepared,” Hankins said. “I’m kind of anxious to see it. It’ll almost be like a boxing match. We’ll kind of feel the first round out then see if we can find places to attack them. There are not many weaknesses over there, I can assure you.”
Causey added another joke before saying what he thinks about the Dolan connection.
“We've been swapping practice film every day. We let them watch ours and we watch theirs,” Causey said with a laugh. “We’ve got coach Dolan who has coached with coach Hankins for many years and think there’s a lot of familiarly there. We’re just kind of getting ready for everything.”
Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. Friday at Warrior Field.
