Alabama NewsCenter 2021 football preview: Huntingdon College
Huntingdon Hawks quarterback Landon Cotney, who started during the team's spring season, is a little more mobile than most of the team's quarterbacks have been, coach Mike Turk says. (Huntingdon Athletics)
Mike Turk became reflective when someone suggested his Huntingdon Hawks‘ USA South Athletic Conference championship in April should be listed with an asterisk because it came after a COVID-19-shortened season.
And their berth in the title game was secured by a coin flip.
“The way we had to go about determining who got to play in the game and all that was not what any of us would have picked, obviously,” Turk said. “But to our guys’ credit, they got an opportunity to go play for the conference championship and they made the most of it and won the game in a way that you like to win the game: on the field.
“When you think about you only played four (regular season) games, that’s different in itself,” the coach said. “But the way we had to navigate everything, you could probably put more than one asterisk by that.”
Four months after topping Methodist 31-20 for the conference crown, the Hawks are preparing to return to the field this fall as football goes back to its traditional season even as the pandemic continues. Alabama NewsCenter is taking a look at the upcoming season and today is focused on Huntingdon College.
Alabama NewsCenter: What are the prospects for this season?
Mike Turk: We always have high expectations here. There are a lot of things that are associated with that, pressure being one of them. But the pressure that’s associated with having high expectations is a blessing. I’ve been around here when there wasn’t any pressure and there were no high expectations. Thankfully, that’s not the case anymore. Our expectation for this football team is the same as it is for all of them. That is to accomplish everything that it’s capable of. In order to do that, you’ve got to show up every week and perform. We’ve had teams around here that were really good. We’ve had teams that won conference championships. We’ve got teams that advanced to the second round of playoffs a couple different times. But none of those teams really accomplished everything that it could along the way. Even though we might have been a really good football team at the end of the year, there was a blemish or a hiccup along the way somewhere that kept it from being what any of us wanted it to be, ultimately. That’s always a challenge that is probably the most difficult one to meet and accomplish because it does require near perfection as far as how you execute everything you do. That includes not just Saturdays but that’s Tuesday afternoons as well. If Tuesday doesn’t go like it should, then it’s gonna be difficult for us to be where we need by Saturday.
ANC: What is the strength of this year’s team?
Turk: That’s a great question. I would have to say that the amount of players that we have back on the defensive side of the ball makes me lean in that direction. Most of the guys that played for us last year are back with us. I thought our defense got better as the year progressed and toward the end of the season, the short season that we had, they were performing well and playing well together. Most of those guys are back with us, so that’s exciting. It’s kind of a similar situation to what we would have been in last fall, had we played last fall. When we didn’t play in the fall, we lost about four guys – four key guys – from our defense. They graduated in December and didn’t play in the spring because they weren’t around anymore. We had to kind of break some new guys in. It’s the same stuff you have to do every year for the most part. But the beauty of what happened for us was that now those guys have the experience of starting games for us and being on the field when it counts.
ANC: Who are your team’s standouts?
Turk: We’ve got a couple of guys that have played a lot of football for us, three in particular that I can name. Karl Dorn and Casey Peppers are both linebacker for us. They’ve both been All-Conference players here and both guys are probably considered to be the leaders of our defense when it’s all said and done. They’re the guys that open their mouths and they’re the guys that kind of set the tempo every day. I’ll add Gavin Walker to that group as a defensive lineman who’s been on the field really since he got here. He’s been a player for us since he was a freshman. He’s the most experienced defensive lineman that we have back and certainly the leader of that group. That’s a pretty good core. We’ve got some other good players, too, that are less experienced and Fred Flavors is one of those. He’s a corner. He’s not necessarily less experienced; this is his third year as a starter for us. Fred’s more of a quiet guy that doesn’t say a whole lot; he leads by example. As I tell him, when you play corner and you do your job, nobody knows you’re on the field. On offense, I would say our quarterback is back from the spring. He started all four games for us in the spring – Landon Cotney. He presents a different dynamic for us, a little more mobile than most of the kids that we play at that position, which adds a different dimension to our offense. Up front, Colin Langford and Darrell Hixon, our right guard and right tackle. Darrell has been starting since he was a freshman in college and Colin since he was a sophomore. They’re both seniors for us this fall. They’re as solid as they come up front and certainly the leaders in that room. I’ll throw a guy named Malachi Harvey out there. Malachi is a receiver for us and he’s going into his junior year with us. He was a running back in high school that we converted to wide receiver when he got here. He, obviously, had a bit of a transition when he got here, feeling his way through, you know, play in the receiver position. And don’t get me wrong, he’s made plays for us before. But he seems to be really coming into his own, being more comfortable with playing that position and being a guy that we really want to target with the ball now. He looks like he can be a really good player for us.
ANC: What game(s) do your fans have circled on your schedule?
Turk: I’ve always said that we’re blessed here in a lot of ways, but primarily because there are natural rivals on the schedule. Birmingham-Southern, LaGrange and Maryville College are all natural rivals. They’re teams that we’ve played down through the years. Birmingham-Southern is in-state, obviously. LaGrange and Maryville have been conference foes of ours no matter where we’ve been along the way. There’s a lot of history there, not necessarily between the football programs but between the two schools. Then you look at the first game of the year, we have the No. 9 team in the country coming in Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Our first road trip of the year will be to Brevard, who’s become quite a rival of ours. Over the last couple of years, they’ve developed their program. There are the usual (opponents) on the conference schedule that, week in and week out, you better be ready to play. We were blessed in that there’s not that just one, maybe two games that I think our fans will get excited about, but a lot of games that our fans will get excited about.
ANC: What is your lingering question?
Turk: I think as much as anything with all the COVID stuff that is hanging out there, your football team could change dramatically from week to week, and that’s not typically the case. Usually, you may get a guy or two hurt in a ballgame and not have them the next week. But this thing has proven to be … the way it spreads, you could be looking at wholesale changes in your lineup from week to week. There’s just the uncertainty of all of that that makes guys like me uncomfortable and keeps us up at night. There’s not a whole lot that we can do to control that. Obviously, we’ve got protocols in place and we do the best we can to mitigate. But what’s real is real, so we have really placed a higher premium this fall on developing the younger players and developing more depth so that if those situations do arise, we haven’t put all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. We have a place to go and a guy that we can plug in that has at least been better prepared, maybe, than he would have been normally. That being said, you’ve got to balance that with making sure the guys you have healthy right now get what they need to be ready to play. That’s a difficult proposition. Getting ready for the first game of the year is always the hardest thing to do anyway because of the heat and conditioning aspect and the limited amount of time that we have leading up to our first game. It’s been a tricky proposition, to say the least, with who gets reps and how to balance that. I guess we’ll find out soon enough how we did.
Alabama NewsCenter is posting season previews for all 15 college football programs in Alabama. Read about West Alabama, Tuskegee, Samford, Alabama A&M, Birmingham-Southern, North Alabama, Troy, South Alabama and Miles, and look for a new football preview each day this week.
