Wildcats head to Navarre to close out regular season

The 2020 regular season will come to an end this Friday, Oct. 30, for the Enterprise Wildcats (7-2) as they hit the road to face off against the Navarre (Fla.) Raiders (4-0).

Enterprise is coming off a resounding win over Class 7A’s No. 3-ranked Auburn last week, while Navarre picked up a win over another Alabama high school in Andalusia on a last-second touchdown pass as time expired.

Navarre’s run-heavy offense is led by senior Jaden Rivera who has rushed for 508 yards and seven touchdowns. The Raider defense is giving up just 15 points per game.

“They’ve won all their games and they don’t give up a lot of points either,” Enterprise coach Rick Darlington said. “It seems like they’re winning a lot of close, low-scoring games.”

While Enterprise and Navarre have never met, Darlington and Raider head coach Jay Walls are very familiar with one another. Darlington said that neither the offense nor defense does anything fancy, but are simply fundamentally sound.

“I know Jay and he is a good coach,” Darlington said. “I’ve known him for more than 20 years. They have a good, fundamentally sound team. They’re usually one of the better teams in West Florida. They’ve got a good program over there.

“They don’t do a lot of things on offense and they defend the run pretty good. Their secondary is pretty active and aggressive on run defense. They’re just really well coached and a tough football team on both sides of the ball. They’re not fancy but they just do a lot of stuff to cause you problems.”

As Enterprise gets set for the playoffs next week, he doesn’t want his Wildcats to lose any momentum but also wants them to continue to improve.

“We just have to keep getting better at the fundamental things,” Darlington emphasized. “I felt like against Auburn I tried to do too much some stuff (on offense), like I reached a little bit.

“I wanted to have everything possible we could do to win the game but looking back in hindsight it may have been better to do just do a few things and do them better. We just want to be efficient and do what we do and do it well. Every week you want to get a win and wins are hard to come by, so we want to gather as many as we can.”