Sam Houston State eager to make return
Winter storm postponed long-awaited season opener
Instead of being on the field last week preparing his team for its season opener Saturday, Sam Houston State football coach K.C. Keeler was on the field with a shovel in his hand.
The winter storms experienced throughout Texas hit hard in Huntsville. Lights were out. Water was scarce. Businesses were shut down.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” cornerback Zyon McCollum said. “I mean, it was similar to an apocalypse.”
The team’s opener against Incarnate Word in San Antonio was rescheduled for April 17, so the Bearkats, No. 17 in the Football Championship Series ratings, instead will open at 6 p.m. Saturday when they host No. 18 Southeastern Louisiana.
An extra week isn’t the longest time to wait, but it could have been longer had Sam Houston not been able to get back on the field.
The Bearkats’ field was covered in snow when the weather was at its worst. Having grown up in Pennsylvania, Keeler knew he had to clear the field before the snow froze.
So Keeler went out and bought the last six shovels in town. Not the last six snow shovels, he was quick to emphasize, but the last six shovels. He and his staff then worked for three straight days to get the field cleared so his players could get back to practice.
“If we wouldn’t have touched that field, the sheet of ice that would’ve been on top of it, we probably couldn’t have gotten on that field until Tuesday or Wednesday,” Keeler said. “That’s how bad the field would’ve been.”
After losing multiple days of practice, Sam Houston has used every minute since to get ready for Saturday. The Bearkats know how important that is, because nobody will give them a break because of the
weather.
Keeler always tells his team there will be no asterisk to this season. Every program is dealing with unique issues, whether they’re related to COVID-19, weather or any other factor. It mirrors Sam Houston’s situation in 2019, when injuries to its top three quarterbacks led to an underwhelming 7-5 record.
“It was just like the icing on the cake of this long wait to see when we’re going to play,” McCollum said. “But we’ve been having adversity. This whole thing started with COVID, and the winter storm, it was no different. By that time, we were used to the feeling. We know that we’ve just got to attack it day in and day out and then play the cards as they fall.”
Having scheduled only six games with the short time between this delayed FCS season and the expected return in the fall, the Bearkats have little room for error. So they’ll look to come out of the gates strong against Southeastern Louisiana and set the tone for the rest of the season.
Sam Houston returns most of its production from 2019, with few players transferring or leaving school early. The Bearkats have three STATS preseason All-Americans in defensive lineman Trace Mascorro, punter Matt McRobert and offensive lineman Colby Thomas.
Joining them on the preseason all-Southland Conference team are McCollum, defensive linemen Joseph Wallace and Jevon Leon, running back Donovan Williams, offensive lineman Eleasah Anderson and cornerback Jaylen Thomas.
Sam Houston State has the second-most wins among FCS teams in the past decade, and the Lions should be a good measuring stick to see whether the Bearkats are at their usual elite level. Southeastern Louisiana has a preseason all-American in cornerback Ferlando Jordan and six preseason all-SLC players, and each of their offensive starters is an upperclassman.
But regardless of the opponent, the Bearkats are hungry to finally get back on the field and play football.
“You can never re-create game day,” quarterback Mike Dare said. “You can practice as much as you want, you can scrimmage as much as you want, you can do intersquad, all this stuff, but you can never recreate the nerves, the butterflies, the adrenaline that you get on game day.”