One final look at the high school football season

General Chat
Post Reply
Orange and Brown
SEOPS Mr. Ohio
Posts: 20590
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 12:49 am
Location: Next to a lake somewhere
Contact:

One final look at the high school football season

Post by Orange and Brown »

WRITTEN BY GARRETT DOWNING
TUESDAY, 17 NOVEMBER 2009 15:29

It’s been a couple of weeks since the high school football season has ended, and we still have a little bit of time before the start of high school hoops, so I figured this would be the perfect time to reflect on the 2009 season.

This was one of the most entertaining, competitive and difficult-to-predict seasons for Athens County football in recent memory. The level of local competition took a significant step up this year, and that made for some entertaining Friday nights.

To break down the season, I pulled out 10 points that stuck out to me from this season.

10: Never underestimate the importance of a good line. The TVC has always been a run dominated conference, and that was the case again this season. The main difference this season was that more teams than just Nelsonville-York and Trimble had a good running game, and much of that had to do with the line play.

Athens and Alexander had strong running games led by powerful offensive lines. Without those lines, the Bulldogs and Spartans are nowhere near as good as they were. Guys like Athens’ Vinnie Rider, Joey Stanley and Jon Keener, and Alexander’s Jerry Dixon and Ryan Elliot made those teams successful because of their dominance up front.

Spend five minutes with Alexander coach Sean Arno talking about the season, and he’ll tell you over and over that the root of his team’s success was the performance of the offensive line. Yeah, he likes to give credit to his linemen because he coached the line for a good part of the season. But it’s more than that.

The dominance up front by Athens and Alexander was too much for teams to handle, and allowed those schools to have one of the best years in recent memory.

Alexander scored 36 rushing touchdowns in the regular season, and did not rely on one flashy tailback to create yards. Instead, the Spartans played old-fashioned football and just pounded the ball up and down the field behind their offensive line.

People tend to overlook the offensive line—that’s just the nature of football—but the performance of the offensive lines this season once again proved that games are won and lost in the trenches.

9. Federal Hocking was better than its 3-7 record. All year I said that the Lancers were victims of a brutal early schedule, and that they just didn’t get the breaks they needed to have success.

Consider this: The combined record for Federal Hocking’s first five opponents was 38-12, and none of those teams had lost a game when they played Federal Hocking. Talk about a tough stretch to open the season. Once Federal Hocking started league play, it started to shape up and played much better football.

The Lancers lost to Southern in triple overtime, but at the time Federal Hocking had yet to win a game. They didn’t know how to play to win. It was a great game, and one of the most competitive games of the year, and I think that if Federal Hocking could have played Southern again at the end of the season, the Lancers would have come out on top.

The only team truly better in the Hocking than Federal Hocking was Trimble.

8. Trey Harris took a huge step forward this season. Harris came into the year as a quarterback trying not to make mistakes, and ended up becoming one of the top passers in the TVC.

In his second year starting, Harris became a playmaker for Athens, and carried them to a league title. He had plenty of weapons around him—including playmakers Ian Dixon and Shad McCollum—but it all started with Harris.

Coach Ryan Adams says that Harris is the “catalyst” of the offense, and that is the perfect word to describe All-TVC selection. Harris doesn’t wow people with his rocket arm or tremendous size (he’s 5-9, 160 pounds), but he finds ways to make positive plays.

Also, he takes care of the football. He doesn’t turn the ball over many times, and he puts the ball in the hands of his playmakers, which is essential to become a good quarterback. The one game this year where Harris struggled was against Nelsonville-York in week 8, and that’s the only game Athens lost, further prove that the Bulldogs offense all starts with Harris.

7. Tyler Dyla is for real. The junior all-state running back for Trimble came into the season with major expectations, and he delivered in just about every way possible. He carried the ball about 30 times a game, and led the Tomcats down another dominating road through the TVC-Hocking.

Dyla has explosiveness out of the backfield, and Trimble’s run oriented offense suits him perfectly. He has good speed, but his quickness is what makes him so dangerous. Not the biggest guy on the field, Dyla plays bigger. He is difficult to tackle, and finds ways to squirm for extra yardage after defenses think they have him stopped. That’s the sign of a good running back: get yards any way possible.

His performance earned him TVC-Hocking offensive player of the year honors. Dyla was a force for Trimble this season, and I look for him to have another impressive year next fall.

6. If Athens wants to compete for the playoffs, it needs to schedule tougher opponents. The Athens Bulldogs had a great season and reached a new level of success this year. I can’t take anything away from that effort.

But the one point I heard throughout the year was that Athens needed to go undefeated to even have a shot at making the playoffs. The Bulldogs lost one game to a team with an 8-2 record, and still finished far out of the playoff race based on the computer points.

The computer points are based on strength of schedule, and Athens is a Division II school playing mostly Division IV and V programs. Winning those games doesn’t get Athens many playoff points, which made it so difficult for the Bulldogs to have a shot at the postseason.

I don’t fault Athens for its schedule this year. The Bulldogs moved out of the SEOAL and into the TVC last year, and were just getting used to the new competition. But in the future, if Athens hopes to become a playoff team, the Bulldogs will need to schedule tougher opponents from bigger schools (like Logan or Canal Winchester).

Playing tougher teams will give Athens more of a expectation of what to expect in the postseason, and will also give the Bulldogs a boost in the playoff standings.

One interesting point to note is that had Athens gone undefeated, the Bulldogs would have earned the sixth seed in Region 7, and earned a first round matchup on the road against Brookhaven.

5. Derek Arnold was just as good this year as he was last season. Nelsonville-York’s Derek Arnold came into the season with extraordinary expectations after he put up monstrous numbers last year.

People wanted him to rush for 2,000 yards, score 30 touchdowns, carry his team to a league championship and the playoffs. And when he wasn’t playing offense, he should shut down opponents from his spot on the defensive line. That’s all.

The expectations were unrealistic, but Arnold still managed to have another impressive season. The Buckeyes centered their offense around Arnold, and that was smart. He deserved that.

Arnold had to shoulder the brunt of the scoring duties because the Buckeyes had a first year starter at quarterback in sophomore Nathan Dean. Everything fell on Arnold’s shoulders. Teams stacked the box expecting to get a steady diet of the running game, and the word on the Buckeyes was that to stop them, you had to stop D.A.

Even with all that attention placed on him, Arnold still powered his team to a league championship and did so with some grit. Whenever the Buckeyes needed a yard, a play, a touchdown, Arnold was the guy. He plays with such intensity, and I’m not sure I know of another back that runs as hard as him.

This year some people made noise that Arnold had taken a step back, and he wasn’t as good as last season. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He developed the defensive part of his game, and still provided nearly all of the Buckeyes offense.

Buckeyes coach Dave Boston says Arnold is one of the best running backs in school history, and Arnold has left some big shoes to fill next season.

4. Sean Arno (Alexander) and Ryan Adams (Athens) did tremendous work this year. Both of these coaches deserve praise for the output they received from their players this season. They got the kind of work ethic and intensity from their players that all coaches dream about.

For years, people had said that Athens and Alexander couldn’t win at football. But that didn’t keep Arno or Adams away from giving it a shot. They proved a lot of people wrong.

They changed the culture at their football programs, and convinced their players they were capable of success. For programs that had been stuck in a downward cycle, that isn’t easy to do. But Adams and Arno found a way to motivate their players, and then did a great job of executing.

Of course, both coaches will tell you that they would have liked to finish a little better. Adams wishes Athens could have avoided the loss to Nelsonville-York and took home an outright league title and made the playoffs. Arno would have liked to avoid a letdown to Meigs and also earned a share of the TVC-Ohio title. All coaches always look for ways to improve.

But those defeats don’t ruin what both coaches accomplished this season. They won were people didn’t expect, and they put the foundations in place for a strong football future.

3. The interest for high school football in Athens County was much higher this year. Every year Nelsonville-York and Trimble have a strong fan base and plenty of talk around town about their football teams. That is always expected.

But this season, the excitement for football around the entire county grew tremendously. The football talk extended beyond Glouster and Nelsonville, and headed over to Albany and into the Plains. With the kind of seasons at Athens and Alexander, everybody was talking about Friday night football.

Not only did Alexander and Athens win games, but it’s important to realize how they did it. They got people excited about football. The played in a way that energized the communities.

Before this season, Athens had not cared much about football since Grant Gregory graduated, I’m not sure Albany had ever cared about football as much as this year. But the Spartans and Bulldogs found a way to change that attitude and bring people to the stadiums on Friday nights.

The game between Alexander and Athens at Rutter Field packed the stadium, and it seemed like one of the biggest crowds ever at an Athens game. Then two weeks later, Nelsonville-York came to Rutter Field and even more people crammed into the stadium.

People truly cared about high school football, and that was fun to watch.

2. Alexander deserves some serious props. I don’t think people can give the Spartans enough credit for what they accomplished this season. Beating Nelsonville-York and making the postseason were hardly even considered possibilities at the start of the season, but Alexander went out and shocked people.

The Spartans surprised everyone with how well they played this season, and finished 8-3 overall. That is no small accomplishment; especially given the stretch of losing seasons Alexander had endured in recent seasons.

Making the playoffs was a giant step in the right direction, and coach Sean Arno says the program still has much room to grow. He envisions establishing a program where playoff appearances are the norm, and winning in the postseason becomes the expectation.

Sure, the Spartans missed out on a three-way tie for the TVC-Ohio after a letdown game to Meigs, but that hardly diminishes the Spartans season. Arno and his team deserve serious credit for the kind of year they had, and it is one that will not be soon forgotten in Albany.

1. Nelsonville-York is still king. Of all the storylines and hoopla surround the TVC-Ohio this season, the one team that somehow seemed to get overlooked was Nelsonville-York.

I’m not sure how that can happen, especially with how dominant the Buckeyes have been in recent years, but I think that people forgot about Nelsonville-York a little bit this year.

The Buckeyes didn’t let that last for too long, as they proved once again to never bet against NY football. Just as people were talking up Alexander and Athens, and questioning the capabilities of Nelsonville-York, the Buckeyes went into Athens and pulled out a gritty victory to get back to the top of the TVC-Ohio. The win had the feeling of an “I told you so” victory by Nelsonville-York, and gave further proof that the Buckeyes are still the team to beat in Athens County.

Nelsonville-York did go through some tough times this year—from the near-firing of coach Dave Boston in the off-season, to losing to Alexander for the first time ever—but they shook all that off did what they do best: win league titles.

Nelsonville-York is the definition of a quality football program, and is an example of what schools like Athens and Alexander hope to become. And if this year was any indication of what the future holds for Athens County football, then the Buckeyes will soon have plenty of competition right at the top.


Post Reply

Return to “The Off season”