Gore hosts Muldrow, Hartshorne in tonight’s scrimmage
The Gore Pirates will get their one and only chance at fine tuning things tonight when they entertain the Muldrow Bulldogs and the Hartshorne Miners in a three-way scrimmage, the one and only preseason scrimmage for the Pirates, at 6:30 tonight at K.G. Horn Stadium.
“We’ve always played Zero Week,” Gore coach Brandon Ellis said. “We like where we’re at offensively and defensively. We’ve got everything put in, so it’s all about clean-up right now. We’re going to take this week to do that. Everybody’s picking up on everything. Now, we’re in a kind of fine-tuning mode. Our test will be (tonight) to work out any kinks. We’ll kind of treat this as a kind of a little preseason game.”
Tonight’s scrimmage will give Ellis a chance to see where his players are at as they get ready for next Friday night’s Zero Week opener at 7 p.m. at Wilburton.
“Some of these younger guys, being their first year of playing high school football, we want to see how they react to high school contact and the speed of it (the game),” Ellis said. “That scrimmage (tonight) will tell us if they’re ahead or behind schedule as far as picking stuff up and playing ‘big boy ball.’ Of course, we want to come out healthy — that is No. 1 for us, coming out healthy.”
On the other hand, this is the first of two preseason scrimmages for the ’Dogs before their annual seasonopening “Battle of 64” with the archrival Roland Rangers at 7 p.m. Sept. 5 at Muldrow’s Marty Rogers Field. Muldrow coach Logan Coatney would like to see all his players see some field action tonight.
“In a perfect world, I could have limited reps for our starters — basically our No 1s and 2s — just to get enough of a feel for what we’re doing,” Coatney said. “That way, we can get plenty of reps for our junior varsity and our freshmen. They need a lot of reps right now.”
The two top priorities about tonight for Coatney and his Bulldogs are to stay healthy and execute on both sides of the ball.
“Coming out of it, the biggest things are staying healthy and executing our base schemes,” Coatney said. “We’re not going to do anything crazy. We just want to do what we do in the simplest of terms. Hopefully, we can go out there and execute our base plays — and come out of it healthy and ready to go next week.”
