TALL IN THE POCKET—Amite QB Brandon Mitchell (9) unloads a pass as he’s wrapped up by a Kentwood defender while teammate Dominic Dillon (61) watches in last week’s 35-6 Amite win. The Warriors come to Hammond Friday for the Tors’ belated season opener. Photo by John Lenz

The rumors are true — Hammond High does have a football team after all, and on Friday night, they're actually going to let the Tors play a game.

Hammond finally gets to open its season after two weeks of hurricane-ordered vacation. But the Tors should not expect any sympathy from the Amite Warriors when they come calling in Tornado Alley Friday night at 7 p.m.

Amite (1-0), ranked fifth in the latest LSWA Class 3A rankings, comes in off an impressive 35-6 season-opening victory over Kentwood last Friday.

The formidable Warriors are not exactly the kind of team you schedule to build a team's confidence — but rather to test its mettle with the District 7-5A wars suddenly looming next week.

“This is going to set the tempo for the rest of the season,” Tors coach Rusty Barrilleaux said. “We're still 0-0. We have no wins and no losses. We finally get a chance to get on the field, and this is the game before district and this sets the tone for how we roll into that.”

Warriors coach Alden Foster likes how his team came off its own extended preseason, but he knows this is an upgraded challenge this week.

“We've still got some wrinkles to knock out, but I thought we played pretty well,” Foster said. “We've got to do a better job of tackling this week than we did last week, and we've got to clean up some reads in the passing game.

“But we go from a 1A team last week to a 5A team this week, so it's a big step.”

The Warriors will certainly be as good or better than anything the Tors will see in district. Against Kentwood, they displayed a powerful running game led by Jermil Perkins (21 carries, 129 yards, 2 TDs) which rolled up 227 rushing yards and averaged 5.5 yards per carry.

But Barrilleaux knows there's no loading up the box on this team.

“Especially with that stud back there calling the plays,” Barrilleaux said of Warriors quarterback Brandon Mitchell, who was 5-for-9 for 99 yards last week, including a 47-yard touchdown bomb to Rodriguez Sibley.

“You can't zone in on one thing and say, ‘If we shut this down, we've got a chance,’” Barrilleaux said. “One time you step up and think it's a run, and he'll throw that thing 60 yards in a heartbeat. One time when you drop back and think he's going to throw the ball, he'll run it down your throat.

“You've got to be very balanced and very disciplined to understand what they do. Hopefully the kids have been listening this week; the coaches have come up with a great game plan.”

Foster, on the other hand, expects he will need a flexible game plan against the Tors, who haven't played since losing to Springfield in the jamboree.

“You've got a team that's well-rested and healed now,” Foster said. “I'm pretty sure that with the time that they've had and not playing, they've had a chance to put in some new wrinkles that we haven't seen on film, so we have our work cut out for us.”

Barrilleaux said more than anything else, he wants to see his Tors match Amite’s intensity.

“You know two things about Amite for sure — they're going to be fast and they will strike you and be very physical,” Barrilleaux said. “We can't match their speed. Speed is speed; you can't account for that. But you can account for being physical and that's what we've got to do. And it's got to be for four quarters or a team like Amite will run away with it.”

But Hammond is not without burners of its own, Foster said.

“They've got athletes and they run those streaks, and at the same time that (Torian) Weber kid, the tailback, is super fast and he can get around the corner. They're pretty big and they're real aggressive on defense.”

The one advantage of the cancellations of the Tors’ first two games is extra practice time for a team that needed to work on its focus and execution after the loss to Springfield.

That and the the fact that the Tors have to be hungry to play a game, and it doesn't matter who it's against.

“We've had some pretty good practices,” Barrilleaux said. “The intensity level is picking up — of course, here comes Friday night, and that helps.

“I know I'm ready to get out there and smell the air and hear the band and look at the lights and everything else, and I think they are, too. Two good schools going head-to-head — it can't get any better than that.”