GAINESVILLE — Drew Atha will never forget how it felt just a year ago.
“Last season, you wore a North Hall shirt and everybody kind of looked at you like you were still playing junior Trojans,” said Atha, a senior defensive back and quarterback, who, along with teammates, suffered through last season's 2-8 campaign.
Atha and his teammates are seeing very different attitudes this week, however -- and they are determined to maintain them after storming to a 24-10 win over West Hall last week in which the Trojans held the explosive Spartans offense to minus-5 yards rushing while putting up 208 yards of their own in a revamped wing-T attack.
(NOTE: For a look at all of the area contests for Week 4, simply click here.)
“This week (we) earned some respect. And everybody was talking about how crazy we looked out there and how we were flying around. And how it was old North Hall football that we used to play,” Atha said. “And I’ve known all along that we’ve got to play like (last) Friday night. We can’t just go out there and stand around on defense and expect somebody to make a play -- because we don’t have any D-I defensive players. We’ve got to play together as a team. And last (Friday) we started playing as a family and flying around, and that’s how we win the ballgame.”
Now the Trojans hope to show that they can win several more -- and if they can pull off a win this Friday, the future should look very bright indeed.
Carrollton pays a visit to The Brickyard tonight in North Hall’s final non-region contest of the campaign. And while the visitors may be 0-3 so far this season, all three losses have come against stout programs -- the same three that defeated Carrollton at the start of 2014 before it went on to defeat North Hall 46-10 in its fourth game.
“(Carrollton is) very talented on both sides of the ball. Their special teams are excellent. They’re not a typical 0-3 football team coming in here,” North Hall coach David Bishop said. “They’re coming in here hungry looking for a win, and I expect the best game out of them this year. Some of the stuff I’ve seen of them and watched offensively -- both sides of the ball -- they’re a much better team than they this time last year -- even when we went to their place.”
Carrollton was also 0-3 at this point last season -- and handed the Trojans a 46-10 loss in Carrollton.
As last week proved, however, this is a very different North Hall team. And the Trojans (1-1) are focused on consolidating the gains made from game 1 to game 2 -- even if they know that to do so will require a stellar performance.
“There’s always a lot we can improve on, so we’ve just got to keep focus on those things, just to keep getting better every week so we can come out with a win this week,” said Nathan Kinney, North Hall senior receiver/linebacker.
North Hall saw major improvement on both sides of the ball last week – including a defense that played with as much emotion as seen at The Brickyard in some time.
“The thing I like the most of all was to see our kids play passionately, play with energy and enthusiasm and feed off each other. That was good Friday night,” Bishop said.
The entire defense elevated its play -- though erstwhile quarterback Atha, who was moved to safety due to a number of injuries on the Trojans’ defense, was instrumental in keeping his teammates charged.
“(Atha’s) been fired up and been a defensive leader, a fireplug over there,” Bishop said. “Dylan Murphy (linebacker) made some great plays Friday night on the defensive side, Christian Barbossa (defensive lineman) as well as some of the other guys over there... It was a whole team effort on defense.”
“We’ve just got to keep the intensity up each week. And I believe we will, because when I’m out there then intensity will be up. I guarantee you that,” Atha said.
Meanwhile, North Hall’s offense not only began to gel, it also gameplanned to take West Hall’s physically-gifted linebackers out of their game -- a ploy that worked brilliantly, as the Trojans used decoys and disguised play direction to get the Spartans guessing.
“We have some things called ‘key busters’ in the wing-T, and we started out early with those,” Bishop said. “And when you do those it tends to slow their linebackers down, and we got their linebackers to the point where they were standing still. So that’s why we were really able to hit them inside and outside all night long.”
The question is, can the Trojans can continue to make it work this week and beyond? Certainly, all of North Hall is eager to find out against an athletic 3-3 stack Carrollton defense. (The visitors are also multiple on offense in order to try and get their athletes isolated in space.)
“I hate to say it; a lot of people say this is a non-region game so it doesn’t matter. But to me it matters. If it didn’t they wouldn’t put a scoreboard up there,” Bishop said. “I want to see a win. But obviously if that doesn’t happen then I want to make sure that our kids continue to play with the level of energy that they had last Friday. When they do that it ignites the crowd; it ignites the sideline; it ignites the coaches. And that allows you to keep just moving from one game to the next. So that’s really what I’m looking for.”
There has been no lack of fire in practice this week -- and players hope to keep riding that excitement back to the kind of success the Trojans came to expect from 2002-20013, when North Hall went 104-37 with nine state playoff appearances and two state semifinal runs.
“I know everybody around here just wants to be back there so bad,” Kinney said. “It’s a big deal to us if we can get North Hall back in the playoffs, get it back where it was a couple of years ago.”
