Game of the Week: Keith heading to Maplesville for battle of ranked teams
Published 5:18 pm Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Keith quarterback Maurice Crumpton runs to the outside during a game earlier this season against Holy Spirit. The Bears will travel to Chilton County to face off against region foe Maplesville in a battle of Alabama High School Athletic Association Class 1A top ten teams. -- File Photo
The No. 8 Keith Bears will travel to the No. 7 Maplesville Red Devils on Friday at 7 p.m. in a matchup that’s effectively a region championship game.
The Bears (8-0, 6-0 Class 1A-Region 3) will travel to Maplesville (7-1, 6-0 Class 1A-Region 3) with the winner clinching the No. 1 playoff seed in region 3.
Keith head football coach Harry Crum said Maplesville is a powerful team, but the Bears aren’t changing up their style going into Friday’s game.
“They’re going to try to play power football, attack-style football. And we’re just going to have to come into that game and do what we do well,” Crum said. “We’re not going to be pretending to be somebody that we’re not. We know what we do and we know we’re a running team, and we’re going to try to establish what we do.”
Crum said the Bears will have to control the football and not turn it over on offense, and not give up big plays on defense in order to capture a victory that he said would be historic for the Bears’ program.
“That would be epic. That would be historic for us to pull this off. It would probably be the biggest win in the history of our program,” Crum said. “We’re going to play to win, and if the stars line up and everything goes just right, I think we’ll have a chance to be in it and win it.”
The Bears are 0-2 all-time against the Red Devils, having been outscored by Maplesville 102-6 in the 2010 and 2011 meetings combined.
But Crum said the Bears aren’t phased by the past meetings, as they have proven earlier this season that just because they’ve never defeated an opponent, doesn’t mean they can’t get the job done.
“Two weeks ago, we had never beaten Billingsley, so I don’t think they [the players] look at that so much,” Crum said. “Our guys just look at it like we’re competitive. We’re going to play hard from the first horn to the last horn. We’re going to give it all we’ve got. I just think that they think this is really the year for us to kind of shine. Nobody’s going to give us a game, we realize that. Everything’s predicated on work and we’re working hard in practice to try to win one for the ages.”
