Two of the last middle school tackle football programs in Northern Arizona play each other Thursday, Sept. 4, as Cottonwood Middle School hosts Williams Middle School.
“The Prescott middle schools don’t have a program. Flagstaff does not,” said head football coach Mark Simmons, a science teacher at Sedona Red Rock High School. “We only play four away games. The team we played in Chino Valley was a youth league team. They weren’t very good, honestly. We had three touchdowns called back.”
Consisting largely of Heritage Middle School seventh- and eighth-graders, the Lobos’ scrimmage opponent Saturday, Aug. 30, proved to be little more than a tune-up, falling 46-20 behind eighth-grader Antoine Zabala at quarterback as well as a barrage of two core groups of Lobo running backs, at three positions, switching with each other every three plays — a strategy Simmons plans to employ “so that we have a fresh group rotating in and out all the time,” he said. “All of them have the potential for a breakaway run on any given play.”
For the full story, please see the Wednesday, Sept. 3, issue of the Cottonwood Journal Extra.
