The Bryant Hornets freshman team will host Pine Bluff in a pre-season scrimmage this evening at 5:30 at Bryant Stadium.
The Hornets are preparing for their official 2013 debut on Thursday, Sept. 5 at Hot Springs Lakeside. The team is coming off an intrasquad scrimmage held last Friday night that had head coach Kenny Horn pleased with his team’s quicker tempo, particularly on offense.
Regarding tonight’s scrimmage, the coach said, “I want to see how aggressive we are. And I want to see that same tempo. That’s what I’m looking forward to.”
The teams will play a 25-minute half.
“What I want to do for us is my group one guys are probably going to go — depending on how our drives go. If our group one offense drives it and scores then I’ll probably only give them one more drive,” he related. “If we go three and out, they’re going to come back in. We want them to have some success.
“The group one defensive guys are going to play against their group one guys,” Horn stated. “At the end, we want to make sure we get everybody in but, on Friday night, our group one guys only got about 10 plays on offense and 10 plays on defense. On Monday, they’re going to get some reps.
“The group two and three guys won’t get as much time as they got Friday,” he related. “If we can get everybody in within 25 minutes then that’ll be the end of it but if we need to add an extra 15 minutes or something to get those other kids in then we will.
“Pine Bluff’s not as deep as we are. They’ve got probably 40 kids and I’m pushing 75 so their depth won’t be like ours as far as how many groups they have. They’ll really only need 30 minutes where I may need 45 but they agreed to go ahead and extend the minutes if we need to.”
As far as how the scrimmage will be managed, Horn said, “We’re going to kind of run it off like a real game as far as the clock goes. We’re going to run the clock. We’re going to wind the 25-second clock. We’re going to stop it on incomplete passes, stop it on out of bounds, stop it on change of possession. Everything except the kicking game. We’ll kick extra points but it won’t be a live rush.”
