Plant City’s Coney out for Friday’s game against Newsome

Posted Sep 20, 2010 by Katherine Smith

Updated Sep 20, 2010 at 07:25 PM

When the Plant City Raiders open district play Friday night against Newsome, they will be without one of their top players.

Starting quarterback Bennie Coney will miss Friday’s game and won’t be at practice until Wednesday for disciplinary reasons. Raiders coach Wayne Ward said the team is preparing to play without him against Newsome. Backup quarterback Nick Rodriguez took snaps with the first team at Monday’s practice and will start Friday night.

“Benny’s a tremendous weapon, but we’ve got some guys we can lean on,” Ward said. “We have so many people we can get the ball to, we just want to come out and run our offense and do a couple of things to keep [Newsome] off balance. They’re very disciplined on the defensive side of the ball, so we’re going to have to play one of our better games.”

Ward expects Coney, who sat out a couple of series against Brandon, including the opening series, to return after the Newsome game.

“It all depends on him,” Ward said. “He’s a kid. He made some mistakes. I made mistakes, so we’re going to help him get through this.”

Plant City’s offense was missing another important piece during Monday’s practice. Starting offensive lineman and Notre Dame commit Jordan Prestwood was limited and not in pads because of a hand injury he sustained in last Friday’s loss to Brandon. Ward said Prestwood should be good to go against Newsome.