By Tim Gayle
Special to EAN
Autauga Academy’s football team must be reloaded and ready to compete for a state championship.
Autauga coach Bobby Carr filled out the Generals’ 2021 football schedule with a pair of Florida teams, visiting the Tallahassee, Fla., area to play 7A Lawton Chiles and 2A Robert F. Munroe this season.
The Generals are coming off the school’s first losing season since 2009 and only the second for Carr in his career as an Alabama Independent School Association coach following a 3-7 season at Edgewood Academy in 2007.
Carr has made a habit of adding Florida teams to his schedule in the first three years of his time at Autauga – which resulted in two championships and three trips to the finals — picking up a road trip to Port St. Joe in 2017 and adding a pair of Florida teams in 2018 and 2019. His 2020 schedule included a trip to play Vernon, but his opponent backed out of the game after the coronavirus pandemic forced a reshuffling of schedules.
Carr had played Vernon and Pensacola Catholic in 2019 — the only two losses suffered by Autauga’s championship team — and he had attempted to reschedule both teams in 2021.7.2
“They didn’t have anything available,” Carr said of Vernon. “Pensacola Catholic had an open date but we could never get the same open date.”
The Lawton Chiles Timberwolves will provide Autauga 25 percent of the gate in return for the Aug. 27 meeting in Tallahassee. The game will be the Timberwolves’ home opener a week after opening at Santa Rosa Beach against South Walton High. Kevin Pettis’ team reached the quarterfinals of the 7A playoffs in 2020, losing 23-7 to Fleming Island and finishing 1-8.
“I put on the Florida (High School) Athletic Association’s classified ads that we were looking for a game,” Carr explained. “I sent our open dates in and they contact us. I also had North Miami High School call and said they would travel to us. If you’re going to travel this far from Miami, you must be absolutely loaded.”
The second Florida opponent, set for Oct. 1, replaces a game with Meadowview Christian that both schools dropped by mutual agreement. The Robert F. Munroe Bobcats are in Havana, just a dozen or so miles east of Chiles. Alex Lehky’s team finished 8-1 in 2020, losing to University Christian 42-0 in the first round of the 2A playoffs.
“They were really good last year,” Carr said, “so that’ll be a tough one. They’re a private school in the Florida (High School) Athletic Association.”
The remainder of the Autauga schedule, released on Wednesday by the Alabama Independent School Association, is merely a reversal of the home-and-home series with the eight AISA opponents on the Generals’ schedule in 2020. Two of the games are on Thursday, with Autauga opening the 2021 season at home against Tuscaloosa Academy on Aug. 19 and playing Bessemer Academy for homecoming on Sept. 23.
The games against the Florida opponents, which come in the second year of the two-year AISA contracts, is for one year only.
“We talked about that, but we’ll just wait and see what happens next year,” Carr said.
