The Pilot Point Bearcats hit the road Aug. 13-14 to face off with Sanger for the Bearcats’ first scrimmage of the preseason.
With the official start of the season right around the corner, the scrimmage allowed the Bearcats freshmen, junior varsity and varsity teams to get full-contact reps and practice livegame scenarios.
“They responded well to that, and I thought we played really hard,” said Chad Worrell, Pilot Point athletic director and head football coach. “Our defense got better as the scrimmage went on, and we created a big turnover on the goal line to get out of a scoring threat there, so you’re always happy whenever you do that. We saw some really good things from our kids.”
The scrimmage originally started at 7 p.m. Aug. 13, which saw drives from both schools’ freshman and junior varsity teams, but an unexpected storm disrupted the var- sity portion of the scrimmage and shifted it to 5 p.m. the next day.
Worrell said the event provided an excellent opportunity for the Bearcats to identify potential issues and finetune things before Week 1.
“We did a great job of playing assignment football,” he said. “Now, we have to execute those blocks. We also had some missed tackles that we’re going to work on, which is common early in the year. We missed several of those on defense during the scrimmage, and we’re going to correct that, [but] we’re light years ahead of where we were last year when it comes to knowing who to block or our assignment and our schemes on offense. Now it’s just a matter of getting there and executing.”
Well on his way into his second season at the helm in Pilot Point, Worrell said he’s happy with the growth the Bearcats demonstrated during the scrimmage.
“I’m really proud of our offensive line,” he said. “They’ve come a long way in the system. Coach [Robbie] Perez and those guys have done a great job getting them ready to go, and our de- fense flew around to the ball. We had some younger guys step up who played really well and made some plays. Fernando Marmolejo, who is coming back [from] injury, had a really good scrimmage on both sides of the ball, along with some younger guys who were really getting their first varsity experience.”
Pilot Point was scheduled to wrap up the preseason against the neighboring Tioga Bulldogs on Thursday evening, and Worrell emphasized the Bearcats would use their final scrimmage to be ready to face the Bonham Purple Warriors to open the season.
“We want to clean up our mistakes that we made last week,” he said. “We want to cut down on the missed tackles and execute our blocks better. We’re going to put them in more of a game situation against Tioga. We’re going to run a live half, so they’ll be out there on their own without coaches on the field, and we want to see them be able to execute in that situation a little bit better and continue to move stuff towards our opener against Bonham.”
