So close
Injuries, close losses help end Alma season with a 5-5 record
By Kevin Taylor
Alma Schools
A hard rain fell on the Alma Airedales Friday night. Under the lights at Citizens Bank Field at Airedale Stadium, the Airedales forged a 3-0 halftime lead against 5A-West conference champion Farmington.
It’s a scenario coach Rusty Bush has watched playout for the last two seasons.
Alma’s 27-15 loss to the Cardinals Friday was a hard pill to swallow in many ways.
“We always are going to play hard,” Bush said. “They’re (Alma players) just built that way and they train that way. They do everything you ask them to do. But we lost some close football games. It was just one of those years. We lost some close games by one score, and even tonight, we’re ahead at halftime. We led in nine of 10 games at halftime this year, we just didn’t finish. We’ve got to figure that out going into the off-season.”
By the time the rain slowed to a trickle in the second half of Friday’s loss, the Airedales could not overcome the second-half deficit and finished the season 5-5 overall and 3-4 in conference play.
Alma finished 4-1 on the road this season (they were 4-2 last season), but managed just one home victory - the sting of “three or four plays” that kept them from beating Van Buren (37-27), Morrilton (30-29) and Vilonia (52-45) and ultimately out of post-season play.
In Friday’s loss, Israel Towns-Robinson ran for 56 yards and a touchdown and finished the season with 704 yards rushing and a team-high 11 touchdowns.
But like many of his teammates, Towns-Robinson missed significant playing time due to injury. He missed the second half of the Siloam Springs game and all of the Hot Springs and Greenbrier games. He touched the ball just twice in the win over Clarksville and had just eight carries for 140 yards and two scores against Pea Ridge.
Mix and matching throughout any season is tough, let alone when you have three tough conference games in a row, such is what the Airedales did with consecutive games against playoff-bound Morrilton, Vilonia, and Greenbrier. In the end, Alma lost five games to five playoff-bound teams.
“In the middle of the season, when it was so tough, we were missing guys,” Bush said. “(But) some of them kept playing through injuries and representing Alma as they should.”
Alma will lose several key players to graduation, including all-everything Cash Farris, Landon Morris, and Ashton Chanhnouvong - the three of whom rarely came off the field. The same is true of many others, including Jackson Mitchell, Noah Ingle, and Brayden Polecat.
Farris ended his career with a 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown.
Junior Sam Schlegel, who also missed significant playing time due to injuries, still managed to catch 31 passes for 578 yards and five touchdowns. He also carried the ball 22 times for 156 yards and two scores.
Sophomore Daniel Rodriguez finished the season with six field goals (the first to have that many since Seth Linker in 2013). He was 6-of-7 in field goal attempts and 36-of-40 in PAT tries.