By By Tim Cottrell
The Escambia County High School turnaround project saw its first big success Friday night here in Atmore, as the 4A Blue Devils upset their old rivals – the 6A Baldwin County Tigers – by a score of 21-14.
While Baldwin County is having a down year this year, Blue Devil head coach Kyle Davis feels that this win could prove to be the turning point for the football program.
"I talked to the team and told them that every team that's ever turned around had that one game you could point to – that benchmark win – that everything turned around," he said. "I told them this might be the one. When we're looking two or three years from now and trying to find the point that things turned around for us, I think this might be that benchmark win people point to."
The Blue Devils will welcome to Atmore Friday what may be the most athletic team they will face all year in the Thomasville Tigers, who were ranked seventh in Class 4A in last week's AHSAA rankings. Davis said Friday night would be a stiff test for the Blue Devils.
"They're very athletic," he said. "They're tough, they're fast, they've got good skill people. They're not as good as UMS. They're so fast on defense they're going to give us a lot of problems. It's going to be tough if they can get to the corner quicker than we can. We're going to have to have flawless play, which we haven't had yet, and get some breaks to win this game. They're scoring about 40 points a game and giving up about five."
Davis said the team still had work to do to get where they want to go.
"Offensively, we've got to do what we're capable of doing," he said. "We've got to put the ball in the end zone. We've had plenty of third and shorts that we've missed on. We've just got to execute flawlessly. We're in the sixth week of the season. We shouldn't be having problems with this now. The team has had the offense down for a long time, but we've got to execute it better. That shouldn't be a big problem."
Davis said the Tigers would be a tough test, but the Blue Devils were capable of competing.
"We've had two solid performances, and hopefully we can continue to build on that performance," he said. "They're going to try to trap us all game like UMS did. We've got to focus on shutting down the boot sweep, the trap, and the boot pass. If we can stop those we'll be ok."
The Blue Devils will host the Tigers at 7 p.m. Friday at Herbert Barnes Stadium.