Cavs a year older and a year more prepared
CULVER — A new offense and a lot of young players made the 2018 season a little rough for the Culver Cavaliers. Head coach Mike Zehner hopes that will accelerate the learning curve for the coming season.
“We had a new offensive system and we have a lot of those guys back,” said Zehner. “Hopefully those lights on Friday night aren’t as bright as they were last year.”
A great off season is another reason for the coach’s optimism.
“It was probably one of the best off season’s we’ve ever had,” said Zehner. “We have six guys squatting over 400 pounds. We have some beef up front and we are a little more athletic than we were a year ago.”
“We will miss our seniors from a year ago but we have 11 seniors back this year and they have some big goals,” he said. “I’m really enjoying this bunch of kids. We’ve had some of the best summer time practices we’ve had here.”
“The leadership that we’ve had from guys like Zac Ditmire, Carter Stevens, Jake Fisher, Donavan Ziaja, Trey Cross, and Hunter Lautt,” said Zehner. “They’ve had amazing summers and I’m excited to see what that translates to.”
“Those seniors build off each other,” he said. “We let them compete with each other in practice and anytime we can let them compete with each other in practice that’s going to make us a better football team.”
Zehner’s underclassmen give him as big a reason to smile with some key returning parts.
“Jalen King came on for us the end of last year and we expect him to be a big contributor on offense,” he said. “Blake Thompson played some at halfback a year ago but I see him filling some time at outside linebacker.
“Austin Zehner has had a nice off season and I see him taking that center position,” he said. “We will average about 250 across the board up front and I think we can give some teams some problems with that.”
The change to a different offensive scheme also plays into the Cavs strenghts.
“With that double tight ‘T’ offense and all the misdirection you really have to tackle almost everybody out of the backfield to stop us,” said Zehner. “Sometimes that’s tough to do.”
“People say it’s an old school offense with everybody going to the
spread and with us it’s kind of ‘back to the future’ here,” said Zehner. “A couple of years ago we wanted to look at what we could do and be good at. We thought we’d have a good physical offensive lines and some solid running backs and we thought this offense fit that well.
Competition for playing time has also been a positive part of the summer for the Cavs.
“We have a nice race at quarterback with
Donavan Ziaja and Tucker Fisher who have both had nice summers,” said Zehner. “I’m interested to see how that will play out.”
“We’ve got some competition and some numbers,” he said. “When you have numbers that helps with two way players and that may have been our achilles heel here in the past couple of years, keeping people healthy and in the fourth quarter.”
A killer schedule in the HNAC keeps everything in perspective.
“Obviously a lot of those programs just tend to reload,” said Zehner. “We have goals for where we want to be at the end of the year but we’re focused on opening night.”