The Trenton Bulldogs will look to move past last week’s tough loss to Illini West as they travel to Spainhower Field in Kirksville to take on the Tigers on Friday night.
Trenton was dealt a heartbreaking loss last week, one that could affect the Bulldogs positively or negatively. Head Coach Wes Croy feels his team is heading in the right direction in that aspect.
“I thought Monday and Tuesday we kind of had the negative effects of the loss,” Croy said. “We were down a little bit and we didn’t necessarily have the level of practice we have become accustomed to over the past couple of weeks. We challenged the kids Tuesday night and basically said you don’t want to hang your hat on a loss. You want to go out and get wins to hang your hat on and we need to keep pushing forward and make sure we don’t waste the effort that we gave last week. The kids responded to the challenge extremely well and we had one of our better practices of the year on Wednesday. Hopefully we kind of jump-started our emotions from a disappointing loss the week before.”
Standing in Trenton’s path to a bounce-back victory are the Kirksville Tigers. At 3-4, the Tigers play in Missouri’s Class 4 division, two classes above the Bulldogs, who are a Class 2 team. While facing a much-larger school poses some match-up issues, it also presents a big opportunity as Trenton will receive double bonus points in the district standings for playing up not one, but two class sizes.
Last year Trenton picked up a 24-7 victory, earning 53 points in the district standings before strength of schedule points were even factored in.
“It’s a huge opportunity and one that we are very aware of and one we do not want to waste,” Croy said. “It’s not going to be an easy task by any means. Kirksville is a much-improved team from the team we beat a year ago. They have a lot of athletes walking around their school and the 11 they put on the field at any one time are pretty gifted kids. They are playing hard right now, so we realize we are going to have to continue to build on what we have done the last few weeks and continue to get better if we expect to go get a win in this football game. We feel like it is a winnable game if we play well, but we are going to have to do everything right to give ourselves that chance.”
Kirksville will look to utilize its team speed and athleticism against the Bulldogs, running out of shotgun and pistol sets.
“Their offensive coordinator is Jason Millnick, who I have known for a long time,” Croy said. “He was at Maysville after me when I was at South Harrison and he was at Schuyler County and we played him there. He is very creative offensively and they will do a lot of things. They use shotgun and pistol formations and they are rarely under center because they like to spread their athletes out. They do a great job of getting those guys in space and that is a concern for us because their team speed is probably better than ours. We are going to have to be good tacklers in space and that hasn’t necessarily been our strength this year. We are going to have to do a really good job of corralling their speed and not let them get vertical.”
Defensively, Kirksville will give Trenton a pretty spread out 3-4 front to look at.
“With the way they run their 3-4, it’s going to cause us to make some adjustments early in the game to find what we are able to attack them with effectively,” Croy said. “They can run and they can tackle well. They are playing really good football right now.”
Two side stories entering the game are running back Colton Neff and receiver Chris Kurtz, both of whom are on the verge of breaking into the top 10 single-season rushing and receiving lists. Kurtz sits just 14 receiving yards shy of Logan Epperson’s mark of 370 yards, which he had in 2006. Neff, meanwhile has a little more work to do to break into the top 10. Neff needs 95 rushing yards to tie Mike Prindle for the 10th most single-season rushing yards in school history with 954, which Prindle reached in 1984 for a Trenton team that won the MEC title.
Kirksville and Trenton will kickoff from Spainhower Field at 7 p.m. on Friday in Kirksville.
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