When a team plays a scrimmage, it hopes to work on the things it needs to improve on and stay healthy.
Athens High School — while it dominated its scrimmage against Federal Hocking — does not get to say it successfully did both.
Micah Saltzman injured his wrist in the team's scrimmage against Federal Hocking on Friday night.
He will be out four to six weeks, according to first-year Athens coach Mickey Cozart.
“Some guys are going to have to step up,” he said. "We’re going to have to go back to the drawing board a little bit and figure out some new roles."
That said, Athens was successful in working on its new offensive and defensive systems under its new coach, Cozart.
At different points throughout the scrimmage, Athens worked on different sets, as one point in the second quarter it worked on the full court trap.
“We got things to work on,” Cozart said. “We’re in a whole new system, we’re in a whole new defensive scheme. There’s a whole lot of new components and parts of what we’re doing this year. It’s gonna take some time.”
The star of the show for Athens in its dominating performance was senior Griffin Lutz.
Lutz did it all for the Bulldogs, as he was scoring, passing and playing tight defense.
Cozart said he wants a lot of his teams' offense to come in transition, and that will rely on the Bulldogs playing good defense and causing turnovers and getting rebounds.
From what was seen Friday night, Lutz will be a leader on the team both offensively and defensively.
“He’s where our team starts, and we’ll expect a lot out of him as far as being a leader,” Cozart said.
Cozart’s defense played well Friday, holding Federal Hocking to below double digits in every quarter, but bad shooting from the Lancers may have been a factor in this.
“There’s a lot that we have to work on,” Cozart said. “We still have a long way to go to be where we want to be."
