Busy night for football in the city

By JAMES TUBB on October 1, 2021.

The Methanex Bowl will be getting a workout tonight.

Both the McCoy Colts and Hat High Hawks have games at the Bowl, with the Hawks taking on Foothills at 5 p.m. and the Colts playing host to Taber high school at 7:30 p.m..

For the Hawks, who are riding the high of a perfect 5-0 record, the matchup brings history and an easy reason to get ready for the game.

“Looking forward to a great program that comes down out of Okotoks,” Hawks head coach Quinn Skelton said. “We have a lot of history with the Falcons and probably in provincial play they are up on us four games to three over the last 15-20 years.”

Hat High is coming off a 34-7 win over the Crescent Heights Vikings last Friday. Despite the win and the perfect record, Skelton says his team went through what he calls ‘grumpy practices’ this week. He says they’re sparked by his team not executing and not coming to practice ready to work.

“Don’t want them to get complacent, sitting back and thinking that 5-0 is all that. We want them to stay motivated, stay focused and work on getting better every week,” Skelton said.

He says he feels his team is ready and that it’ll show in tonight’s game if the week’s work was effective.

“Tomorrow is execution time and if we’ve done our work this week, then tomorrow is just put it all together and execute and play well,” he said.

In the later game, the Colts are looking to bounce back from a tough 10-3 loss in Airdrie. Head coach Darrell Grass says McCoy will be matching up against a good team in Taber.

“Taber’s a good team. It was a close game between Brooks and them last week,” Grass said. “Watching film on them they’ve got a pretty good team. Once again our goal is just getting better every week and we’re almost there. We’re almost turning a corner and hopefully we can get some confidence going into our last couple weeks.”

Besides the score on the field, Grass says a winning week for the Colts would simply be his team getting better.

“We’ve got blown out a couple of times, we had a close game last week but we gave up the lead late in the game. It’s having that confidence that when we make a bad play or they have a good play or we have a call go against us, it’s to just be able to reload and re-focus,” Grass said.

He says his young team is getting more confidence and are gelling more as a team. Once they put it all together, he says they will be a pretty good opponent.

The biggest thing for Grass and the Colts, he says, is not beating themselves up on a bad play but not getting too high on a good one. He says it’s all a part of being a young, less experienced team that needs to build its confidence.

“You can’t go over every play and against every opponent so they just have to get that experience and say, ‘OK, we have to reload,’ instead of getting down on themselves. That’s a typical characteristic of a young team and an inexperienced team,” he said.

Grass says if the Colts get some momentum early in the game he believes his team can do well against Taber.

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