It’s Here !! Championship Week !! The week that every high school football team in the state aims for when practices begin in the sweltering heat of late July. The Class AAAA game will feature Buford (14-0) vs St Pius X (12-2) and is set for a 4:30 kickoff at the Georgia Dome Saturday afternoon.
Both head coaches have tried to keep things normal in a week that is anything but normal. The Buford Wolves had Alabama Head Coach Nick Saban at their practice Monday. That might be unusual for some, but we are talking Buford . The fact that the coach of the SEC Champions and the number one seed for the first College Football Playoff came to visit didn’t seem a distraction at all.
Things are a little different when it comes to preparation this week. “We have moved things back a day”, says Coach Jess Simpson . ” We will be on the field for a short time Monday, what we normally do on Sunday. “With the game being played Saturday afternoon, we don’t want the guys all ready to play by the middle of the week.”
The story was much the same at St Pius.The Golden Lions, who lost their first two games of the season, avenged one of those loses by beating Woodward Academy to make it to the this week’s final. Coach Paul Standard sent his team through a practice Tuesday evening with a cold drizzle falling. ” We had no practice Monday” , says Standard. “Tuesday , Wednesday and Thursday will be our big work days and Friday we will take the team to mass and have our team meeting.
Both practices look about the same, but the workout at St.Pius had a different sound. Crowd noise was being piped in over the stadium’s public address system in an attempt to prepare the Golden Lions for the noise of the Georgia Dome. The last time Paul Standard’s team played in the dome was in the AAA Championship Game. There are 3 seniors on this years team that played in that game.
Jess Simpson says that the noise of playing at Cartersville last week was enough to help his crew get ready for the Georgia Dome, a place that Buford knows all to well. Saturday Buford will play in the championship game for the 13th time in 15 years. The Wolves will bring a 39 game winning streak in the game. That streak started during the 2012 season, a season that saw The Wolves forced to forfeit 2 games and lose to Deshaun Watson and Gainesville(at Buford).
That Buford team finished with a (12-3) record, still winning the state championship with a 10-3 win over St Pius. Saturday afternoon, the Wolves and Golden Lions will rumble again in the Georgia Dome.