Published Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Peachtree Ridge coach impressed with Newnan

The Newnan Times-Herald

The Newnan Cougars face what is literally a "big" challenge Friday night.

The Peachtree Ridge Lions, representing a school with an enrollment of over 3,000 students, visit Drake Stadium this week to take on the Cougars in a battle between the No. 3 (Peachtree Ridge) and No. 4 (Newnan) ranked teams in Class 5-A.

But listening to Peachtree Ridge head coach Bill Ballard, you'd think it was his team playing the role of David against Newnan's Goliath instead of the other way around.

"We're expecting to go up against a real good football team," he said. "We know Newnan has a lot of talent. They're well-coached and play with a lot of discipline. We know we have our work cut out for us."

Peachtree Ridge comes in at 2-0 with wins over McEachern and Roswell while Newnan is 1-0 following its season-opening win over LaGrange two weeks ago.

The Cougars didn't play last Friday.

"We're a very young football team," said Ballard, who also serves as his team's defensive coordinator. "Fifteen out of our 22 starters on offense and defense are first-year starters. We're trying to grow as a team and hopefully playing against a good team like Newnan will help us do that.

"We feel like playing tough competition like we did in our first two games and now Newnan will help prepare us for our region and hopefully the playoffs."

The Lions' first two wins were closely played games, beating McEachern by three points (24-21) in the Georgia Dome in the Corky Kell Classic and Roswell by seven (24-17) in their home opener last Friday.

Quarterback Billy Best threw a five-yard touchdown pass with one minute to play to beat Roswell, capping a 10-point fourth quarter and a come-from-behind win.

"He's one of our first-year starters," Ballard said of his quarterback. "But he's done a good job for us. He's a good little player."

Best also ran for a first quarter touchdown while Joe Horn, Jr. scored on a 20-yard reverse and Justin Watts kicked a 41-yard field goal that tied the game at 17.

"We've had an interesting rivalry with Roswell," he said. "We were 0-1-1 heading into last week's game against them. It was great to get a win."

Ballard said his team is "banged up" this week.

"We felt coming into this season that our linebacking corps was one of our strong points. But we've got a couple of linebackers who might not be able to play because of injuries," he said.

"One of them is also our long snapper who suffered a concussion which we didn't really find out about until after his second bad snap."

Those two bad snaps gave Roswell great field position and resulted in the Hornets' two touchdowns.

"We're working hard to correct those mistakes this week," the coach said. "We know we can't do that against Newnan and expect to win."

Peachtree Ridge is 32-10 in three-plus seasons under Ballard who was a linebacker on Furman's 1988 national championship team. He came to the Suwanee school after posting a 53-8 mark in five years at Tucker.

Last year's team (10-3) fell to Northside-Warner Robins, 20-17, in overtime the week before Northside eliminated Newnan in the semifinals.

"I watched Newnan play North Gwinnett a couple of years ago," he said, "and was very impressed with the players and the program and whole community.

"We know they've been highly ranked over the last three seasons and have a long tradition of great football. e wanted to face a really good team in a hostile environment. Obviously we want to win, but we're looking long term at how it can help us compete. We believe playing tough teams early on gets you ready for what you'll face down the road."