Penguins happy to be back at home

Youngstown State has only five games at Stambaugh Stadium this season.

By PETE MOLLICA

VINDICATOR SPORTS STAFF

YOUNGSTOWN — Youngstown State football coach Jon Heacock is glad to be back home to play.

The Penguins have only played one game, losing their season opener at Pittsburgh last Saturday, 38-3 at Heinz Field, but Heacock knows the Penguins only have five home games this season and he wants to enjoy all of them.

For the first time since 1987, a span of 22 seasons, the Penguins will play more games on the road (6) than they will at home.

Youngstown State will hold its home opener on Saturday afternoon when it plays host to Austin Peay in a 4 p.m. kickoff at Stambaugh Stadium.

“You are always glad to be back at home, but this year it means even more because we have so few home games,” said Heacock.

The veteran coach, now in his ninth season, evaluated his team’s performance last week against Pitt and came out with some promising thoughts.

“We competed and we played very hard,” he said. “We still have a lot of work to do, but I like our football team. You have to get better and improve and everybody says that this is the week when you show your biggest improvement.

“We made some mistakes, but they can be fixed,” Heacock added. “We have to do a better job of lining up and although we didn’t miss a lot of tackles we did miss some critical ones.”

Heacock said after evaluating the films he saw some solid performances.

“There weren’t many winning performances, but there were some solid ones,” he said.

“Playing at home is the best fix for this team,” he added. “It’s our first home game and a great opportunity for us to get better. We prepared hard last week and when you prepare and it doesn’t go the way you want it to it bothers you.”

Heacock said the Penguins came out of the Pitt game in good physical shape.

“We had the usual bumps and bruises from the game, but our biggest problem right now is the flu bug as we have several players, some of them last Saturday, who are suffering from the bug,” he said.

Last week, for the fifth straight game, the Penguins failed to score a touchdown against a FBS opponent.

Offensively the Penguins managed just 159 total yards, including just 46 yards rushing.

Senior quarterback Brandon Summers finished the game hitting on 11 of 22 passes for 113 yards, but he was intercepted twice. He also overthrew a couple of wide open receivers, but he also had a couple of passes dropped. Summers was also sacked six times.

The running game was completely shut down by the Panthers’ defense and only senior tailback Kevin Smith finished in double figures as he picked up 47 yards on 17 carries.

Defensively the Penguins did a pretty good job of stopping the Panthers inside, but on the outside was another matter as freshman tailback Dion Lewis rambled for 129 yards on 20 carries and scored three touchdowns, one of them on a pass reception.

The Penguins did receive some good news this week as senior cornerback Lenny Wicks, a starter from last year, has returned to practice. Wicks suffered a severe knee injury in the spring game, had surgery and has been rehabbing the knee all summer. It is still doubtful he’ll be ready to play on Saturday, but just having him back at practice was big lift for the Penguins.

Heacock said after watching film of Austin Peay the Governors have come a long way from last season when they were 2-9.

“They have a couple of talented tailbacks, who both rushed for over 100 yards last week and they have a great return guy,” he said. “We’re going to have to play a lot better than we did last week.”

mollica@vindy.com