MEADEVILLE — Franklin County High School will face a tough, physical challenge Friday when it hosts Hazelhurst High School.

“Coach (Todd) McDaniel’s teams are always known to be extremely physical,” Franklin County head coach Trent Hammond said.

“The only way to fight back against that is to match their physicality. We’ve tried to establish being a physical team all year, and we’ll see how we are in that regard, because you can’t beat a physical team like Hazelhurst by backing away.”

Hammond said Hazelhurst also presents a challenge with misdirection on offense.

“They’re an extremely fast Wing-T team,” Hammond said. “You know what they’re going to do and we know what they’re going to do, just like us (with running the football).

“It brings some challenges, because there’s a lot of misdirection, so we’ll have to get in there and play solid football.”

Solid football includes players knowing their assignments, so the misdirection of the Wing-T doesn’t result in big gains.

“We’ve talked about assignment football every day so far this week, and we will continue to do so,” Hammond said. “Hopefully it’ll get in their heads.”

Last Friday saw the Bulldogs get a 49-24 win against Wilkinson County High School.

“The coaches did a good job preparing the kids for what they were going to see,” Hammond said. “Offensively, we were able to move the football and do what we wanted to do. Defensively, we played well enough to where we didn’t give up a lot of rushing yards until late in the game.”

Hammond singled out Wilkinson County’s Devin Fosselman as someone that gave them trouble last Friday.

“They have a great player in Fosselman. He did a lot of things at wide receiver that we didn’t really see him do on film. We had to make some adjustments in the secondary to help us with him.”

Hammond also said it was good Franklin County (5-2, 1-0) to win its first district game, but he’s not one to get too caught up over district play.

“I’m a big ‘take it Friday to Friday’ guy,” Hammond said. “We’re focusing on one game at a time.”

For Friday’s game, Hammond said he thinks the team with least amount of mistakes will come out on top.

“We can’t put the ball on the ground and have crazy penalties. I think the team that eliminates those will be the team that wins.”