It was not the scenario Northside envisioned in its highly anticipated 7A-Central opener last week at Bryant.

The Grizzlies and their coach, Mike Falleur, are simply moving on, though.

Playing in a deluge of rain, and having already had the start pushed back due to lightning, the Grizzlies trailed 16-7 late in the first half. But that’s when more rain and lightning hit the area, forcing the game to be stopped.

After debate as to whether the game would continue that night or even be resumed on another day, it was agreed that Bryant would be awarded a 16-7 win, resulting in the Grizzlies’ first loss of the season.

“We’re disappointed we didn’t finish the game, we felt like it would be a good game win or lose, but for the betterment of our kids and our team, the best thing to do was to put that one in the books and let’s get ready for the next one,” Falleur said.

It was already a tough situation even before the game started.

“First of all, we had two delays before the game ever started while we were warming up,” Falleur said. “Then we played basically the first half, and then it was 57 seconds left when they took us off the field and then (Bryant officials) came over and said, ‘We’re just going to go to halftime, are you good with that?’ And I said I’m fine.”

Then nearly an hour later, after checking the weather radar, Bryant’s contingent went back to Falleur to assess the situation.

“I think it was 9:30 (p.m.), and they came back and said it looked like the earliest we would re-start is 12:30 to 1 a.m.,” Falleur said. “We had already been sitting in the locker room for two hours, and that meant two more hours.


“You’ve played one half of football, one physical half of football, now you’ve sat down and cooled off, and you’ve got guys that are already starting to get stiff, we’ve got key people with ice on.”

Falleur added another option was to resume on Saturday or even on Monday. But Falleur didn’t want to come back on Saturday, because it meant driving back to Fort Smith after Friday’s game, turning around and driving back to Bryant on Saturday with even more rain in the forecast.

“The third option was to go back Monday, which I said we would do if we could start at 5 (p.m.), and they were, ‘No, we can’t start at 5, we’ve got to be at 7 because of our parents,’ and I understood that,” Falleur said. “So that to me became not an option because now we’re messing with this week’s game.

“I just met with my coaches and just thought that the best thing for us in the long run was to drive home and that’s the ballgame; our kids were disappointed, our coaches were disappointed, but we’ve got six regular season games left and we talk about player safety all the time, about putting kids first. Well to me, sitting in a locker room for four hours and going back out there in the rain and playing, that’s a safety issue.”

Northside (3-1, 0-1) fell behind 10-0 early on a pair of special-teams mishaps, a bad snap on a punt which went out of the end zone for a safety and a shanked punt which gave Bryant the ball inside the Grizzly 20, setting up its first touchdown.

The Grizzlies came back and put together a lengthy drive, ending with a touchdown run from quarterback Deuce Wise, before Bryant scored another TD right before the game was called.

Northside is back on the road this week, as the Grizzlies travel to face Little Rock Central.
