Falcons set sights on Knox

WALKERTON - You can forgive Glenn head football coach Austin Foust and his Falcons if they are flying a little higher these days. A come-frombehind win over Jimtown a week ago puts them at 3-1 on the new season.

“It’s been since 1990 that our program has beaten Jimtown,” said Foust. “To put that in perspective, I was not even alive at that time. It’s a huge win for our program, a huge win for our community and our kids.”

Glenn also won their first two games of the season, an accomplishment that also hadn’t been accomplished in a long time. The distraction of being the talk of school and of the community took its toll in a big loss to South Bend St. Joseph.

“I think that is a distraction,” said Foust. “From where we’ve been and where we want to get we are still trying to figure out things along the way, learning how to have success and what that entails. We maybe listened to it a little too much and kind of relaxed a little against St. Joe and the effort level wasn’t there.

“I challenged our kids last week. We’ve seen both teams that we can be. We’ve played really bad and we’ve played really well. We challenged them and they answered the bell and played hard all night long.”

That doesn’t mean there weren’t some coaching points along the way.

“We really dominated the whole game,” said Foust. “Jimtown’s first three possessions were three fumbles and we only got three points from it. That was kind of disappointing. When we were down at halftime I just told the kids that we’ve been here before. The effort level is there we just have to finish.”

A touchdown with around five minutes to go in the game was the difference, with the defense coming on to seal the win.

“It took a little longer than we would like,” said Foust. “We finished the way every coach wants to finish a game. With the ball, taking a knee.”

The Falcons had a chance to enjoy it for the weekend but work started on Monday for another powerful opponent. Knox comes to town and the Redskins are hitting on all cylinders.

“They are a good football team,” said Foust. “Under coach Radtke, they are running his offense and it’s starting to click for them and it makes them extremely dangerous.

“You spend so much time game-planning, going through all their formations and how to line up and how we can make it simple for our kids. The film that we have they’ve shown 35 different formations.

“We told our kids we have to be students of the game this week. We have to understand alignments, who’s eligible, who’s not eligible. We have to line up correctly. That’s half the battle with Knox. Defensively we are still at times lining up incorrectly and that gets us in trouble. That’s one of our challenges this week.

“We need to continue the effort that we had against Jimtown. That’s the standard that we want to see from now on.”