South Johnston finished its summer seven-on-seven summer football schedule with matchups at Campbell on Tuesday evening.
The Trojans faced Knightdale, Jack Britt, Mountain Island Charter and Northwest Cabarrus.
“Mountain Island is a new private school out of the Charlotte area (Mount Holly),” said South coach Matt Riggsbee. “I didn’t know about them until this week. They had several good players. They said they had one kid (Marcus Graham) committed to Wisconsin.”
Josh Schindler is South’s top quarterback after the last passing scrimmage of 2018.
“Josh did well, especially the first half of the tournament,” Riggsbee said. “The first two games, we didn’t have trouble moving the ball and putting together scoring drives. He made great decisions. … Our top receivers for the day were Jaquain Smith and Tony Alston.”
Alston is a rising junior, new to the receiver position.
“We did well defensively as a unit,” Riggsbee said. ” … We made some great plays on the ball and broke up a lot of passes. Jawuan Smith definitely held his ground. Nobody was able to get too much on him.”
Riggsbee put the summer in perspective.
“I like to go over there and compete and have success and all that, but that’s not real football,” Riggsbee said. “I’ve seen teams go undefeated in seven-on-sevens all summer long, win tournaments and this, that and the other and then they don’t win a game in the regular season.
“I’ve seen teams that don’t win a single game in seven-on-seven and maybe never even score in seven-on-sevens and they go out there and win the dang state championship. I don’t look at seven-on-seven and say, ‘Oh man, we did great this summer, we’re going to have a great year’ or ‘Oh man, we did terrible in seven-on-seven, we’re going to have a terrible year.’ It just doesn’t add up like that.
“In seven-on-seven situational football, you’re taking the run game out of it. If we’ve only got one or two yards to go or if we’re on the 1- or 2-yard line to score, it really limits us if all we can do is throw the football. I know what we’re really going to do.”
This coming week is a dead period for public schools with the coaches clinic and East-West All-Star games in Greensboro.
“We’ve got mini-camp coming up after the dead period,” Riggsbee said. “We’ll start installing all of our special teams and get our shoulder pads back on, start focusing on the fundamentals of tackling again, … really fine tuning all the way up to our first scrimmage.”