Hat High Hawks experience first loss

By JAMES TUBB on October 9, 2021.

Thursday night brought something the Hat High Hawks hadn’t experienced this season: losing.

The Hawks were 6-0 on the season entering Thursday’s game in Raymond before losing 28-16 to the Comets. Head coach Quinn Skelton says his team played quite well in the game, but Raymond capitalized on a couple tipping points in the game for the Hawks.

“Only a couple broken runs where they got two long passes and one long run down the sidelines,” Skelton said. “Other than that, taking a few penalties that extended drives and in particular, two penalties that turned out to be touchdown drives for Raymond too. Instead of having them third-and-15 we ended up giving them a first down on a roughing the punter type thing.”

Hat High led 8-6 at the half before Raymond took over. Skelton says despite the loss, the Hawks made their plays but that the Comets capitalized on the little things.

“We battled very well with them,” he said. “We earned our first downs, we had a couple nice broken plays that went for long runs – one was a touchdown and one was almost a touchdown that ended up being a touchdown.”

He says his team will work on their attention to detail to address the mistakes this week at practice and ahead of their game Friday against Catholic Central.

“It will be a real concentration on detail, on ball control, clock control, not making mistakes on offence and defence and cleaning up the emotional part of the game,” said Skelton. “Making sure we are playing our game and doing things well.”

As for the no-longer-perfect record, Skelton says he’s not big on protecting the perfect record and focuses more on development.

“Sometimes you have to fall down a couple times to get back stronger,” he said.