For the Coppell football team, Friday’s game is more than just any other usual game of the season. It’s 7 p.m. clash against Plano Prestonwood Christian Academy at Buddy Echols Field is the Cowboys’ home opener and provides a great opportunity to perfect their schemes and game plans. 

“We’ve continued to try and improve on what we do, we aren’t changing anything scheme-wise, we’re just trying to get better at it and we certainly have room for improvement based off of last week so we’ve tried to focus on us and make it more about us than about them,” Coppell coach Michael DeWitt said.

For Prestonwood, junior quarterback Maguire Martin leads the offensive attack with assistance from junior running back Tarris Murray and senior wide receiver Nathan Stafford.

“[Prestonwood’s] quarterback’s a good player; he is athletic, he can throw a good ball and he can extend the play, he’s probably a little unassuming [because] he’s not a tall, big kid but he’ll beat us if we don’t play well,” DeWitt said. “[Stafford] is fast and they like to get him the ball in space on a quick game and pop and they’ve got [Murray], who’s a big running back [at about] 190 pounds, who’ll run really hard.”

Film study has emphasized how to disrupt Prestonwood’s coverage and identify its blitz patterns.

“Hopefully, we’ll come out manning them up and using our athleticism because we have better athletes than them and we have to stop [Martin] because he runs hard,” Coppell junior cornerback Braxton Myers said.

The private school vs. public school debate is a talking point amongst the fans coming into this game but for the Coppell football team, every game and every opponent is the same. 

“For both coaches and both teams, it doesn’t matter who you are playing, we want to win so it doesn’t matter if we are playing a public school or a private school, our approach is going to be the same every week,” DeWitt said. “We want to play really well and we want to win.”  

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