LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) – The Monterey Plainsmen (6-4) will try to keep their season alive Friday with a six-hour bus trip to El Paso Americas (6-4)- a team that reached the postseason with four combined wins over Coronado, Hanks, Bel Air, and Parkland.
“They’ve got a good football team, they’ve got some decent size. They’ve got a really good wide receiver that we’re going to have to keep in check. They’re going to have a home crowd behind them, so it’s going to be a tough ball game,” said Monterey head coach Jason Sims.
This will not be Monterey’s first trip to the Borderland. In week three, they lost to the Franklin Cougars 49-42. The same Franklin team played Americas weeks later and won 73-20. However, Coach Sims says the score difference in the two games should never be used to predict the outcome.
“Previous game scores don’t put any points on the board for you in a football game, so we’re going to have to go out there and compete and show them the utmost respect and maybe some of the fear factor might creep into them from the score watching if that’s what they want to do, but we’re not going to participate in that,” he said.
While Monterey’s Sept. 12 outing was affected by travel issues and weather, Sims says he’s thankful his team already has made an El Paso trip so his players can be more familiar with the atmosphere for Friday’s playoff game.
“The fact that we’ve gone to El Paso already this year is big because it’s not going to be a new thing. We already understand what we’re about to get ourselves into, and so I think that’s going to be a huge benefit.”
Kickoff set for 7 p.m. CT at the Socorro ISD Student Activity Center. The winner will face Fort Worth Arlington Heights or Fort Worth Brewer.
“We’ve done some really good things. We’ve had a pretty good season overall. We’ve lost some really tight ball games to some really good football teams, and I think that belief is there, and we’ve had the talent to go beat teams when we play well,” said Coach Sims. “I feel like our run game is finally where we want it to be, our passing game has developed. We’re starting to see some better defensive line play and flying around and better defensive play than we did kind of in the middle of the season, and so we’re playing the football you need to be playing at the time you need to be playing it.”
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