Alabama NewsCenter 2021 football preview: Alabama State University
The Magic City Classic is the biggest event of the year for both Legion Field and HBCU sports. (Alabama State Athletics)
Someday, Donald Hill-Eley says, his Alabama State football players will tell their grandchildren about their experiences with the pandemic. And they’ll talk about how it changed them.
“Players will be able to be galvanized from it,” the coach said. “This pandemic is what the Great Depression was for our grandfathers, it’s what World War II was for our dads, or Vietnam. Now COVID is the same for these kids and these young folks.
“It will help build a resilience of these kids as they go on,” Hill-Eley continued. “We used to always say that this generation will quit on you. But COVID has taught them that you can’t quit, that you’ve got to be prepared and that you’ve got to work through it. They’ve all had losses and all different things, but this is something that’s going to make them stronger as a generation for years to come.”
The Hornets 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 Alabama State.
Alabama NewsCenter: What are the prospects for this season?
Donald Hill-Eley: To play in the spring, it was something that wasn’t traditionally done. But you can see now in practice, a lot of maturity has happened. Some of the things when we started practice that we normally couldn’t do until two and three weeks out, we were able to do Day One. That’s mainly because everything was still fresh to our young men because they had a short turnaround. But you can still see that the thing that we have to guard against is how hard we work them through the duration of an 11-12 game schedule so that they don’t get burned out. We’re fortunate that we only lost two players that got hurt in the spring and couldn’t be back for the fall. Now it’s just a matter of just creating some mental toughness, of getting them through this second season of 2021.
ANC: What is the strength of this year’s team?
Hill-Eley: I would say our defense is what we hang our hats on. We know that we’re going to be able to get after people. We always have, which gives us a chance to get short fields for offensive turnarounds. But more importantly, it gives us a situation that we can go in and create turnovers and create opportunities that we can score. When you look at great teams and teams that win championships, they have very good defenses. As we continue to build our program, I think that we have the defensive staff and the defensive players in place to make that happen.
ANC: Who are your team’s standouts?
Hill-Eley: On the back end, you’ve got Irshaad Davis, who’s our free safety. He makes a bunch of plays and is a preseason All-American. Up in front of him, you have All-Conference preseason Bubba (Colton) Adams and in front of him, you’ve got Christian Clark and Nick Terry. We have a tier of guys defensively. On the offensive side, you have our quarterback Ryan Nettles, who’s preseason All-Conference as well, and Jeremiah Hixon, who’s our slot receiver that makes a lot of plays, and also our tight end Terrance Ellis, who’s preseason All-Conference. When you look at our offensive line, with Charlie Maxwell and those guys, you see that we have a good, strong group of linemen as well.
ANC: What game(s) do your fans have circled on your schedule?
Hill-Eley: This is probably one of the premier schedules for our fans because we have so many Alabama rivalries. We start off with Miles. That’s always a dogfight even though they are Division II because of proximity and traditions of the school. Then we go up the road 40 minutes to Auburn, who’s always been a stakeholder in this state. A lot of our fans want to go and see that competition. Then (Alabama) A&M, the Magic City Classic is checked off by everybody. Then we close out the year with Tuskegee, which is an 80-year-old rivalry that just got rekindled to be able to be played on Turkey Day. So from one end of I-65 up the other end of I-85, we have in-state rivalries, at least four, that will take place on this year’s schedule.
ANC: What is your lingering question?
Hill-Eley: Last year, with four freshmen offensive linemen playing for us, a lot of games they played extremely well and a couple of games not so well. They had some freshman woes. Our kicking game. We have to shore up our kicking game. We have to be able to be automatic from 25 yards in if we’re going to have a chance to have success week in and week out. Defensively, there has to be a continued carryover from last spring of just getting after people and adding the fire to the team with the way that they play. If those things are all in place, we’re going to have a great year.
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, Miles and Huntingdon, and look for a new football preview Friday.
