Hat football teams looking to build off semi finals

By JAMES TUBB on October 26, 2022.

jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb

All three of Medicine Hat’s varsity football teams head into the final week of Rangeland Football action with the same goal: to win. But, only two of them will have the chance to come out victorious.

The Hat High Hawks and Crescent Heights Vikings will fight for first place in the league and the McCoy Colts will hit the road to take on the Brooks Buffalos in a battle for third.

Crescent Heights head coach Scott Wendell says the Vikings put a lot of focus on not looking past Brooks last week as they beat the Buffalos 38-0 on Oct. 21 to earn their finals spot.

“We wanted to really come well prepared and polished for that game, and even though we did really well on the scoreboard, there were a lot of opportunities to assess ourselves and look for areas for improvement this week to get ready for the next game,” Wendell said. “So it was a good game, it was good team building game, which got us a lot of momentum going forward. But a lot a lot of things that we can work on from that game.”

The RFC finals will be a rematch not only of last year, which the Hawks won by a score of 42-7, but also the final week of the season when Hat High beat Crescent Heights 24-6. Wendell says they’ve been preaching to their players to execute the little things in order to be successful.

“We just want to be a little bit better at some of our small details. We know after playing Hat High that first game, physically we can match up with those guys and we feel really confident in that area,” Wendell said. “We can close that gap if we can clean up some of those small pieces on offence and defence and continue to refine.”

Across the field from the Vikings, Hat High enters Friday’s game off a 58-0 win over McCoy on Oct. 21. Hawks head coach Quinn Skelton says that win was all about executing and doing the right things.

“We had a good week of practice prior to the game on Friday night and our goal for the week was basically execution, and we wanted to play at a level coming into playoffs and go hard for that first half and let our starters play,” Skelton said. “The boys executed really well for the first half and then set it up for the backups to come in and play out the second half.”

With provincial playoffs on the horizon, Skelton says a difficulty of the time of year is keeping everyone focused one game at a time.

“You’ve got to prepare each and every week. If boys go in and think they’re all that and overconfident, it certainly doesn’t set you up for the next week,” Skelton said. “The challenge was to stay mentally focused and play a real good, hard physical game last Friday and I think they did a good job with that.”

While the Vikings and Hawks duel it out, the Colts will be in Brooks looking to end their RFC season on a high note. Colts head coach Jole Krassman says they had a strong start against the Hawks and despite the lead, did not give up throughout.

“We tried a few things, some onside kicks, we tried a few deep ones that we ended up getting back and we ended up recovering a second down punt, so we had some very small successes,” Krassman said. “At halftime I just said to the guys, it’s 40-0 and we have two options, we can either just pull up our flags and pack it in and just forfeit the rest of the game or we can go out there, we can get meaningful reps with our second team guys in and we can just build for next year. They were all in and that’s awesome.

“It lets me know that folding and quitting is never an option and our guys are already starting to get it. We never quit. We never surrender. We’re going to keep playing. I don’t care what scoreboard says, it’s now 0-0. Let’s go out, let’s try to win this second half and just build on it.”

Krassman says his goal versus the Buffalos is to show their improvements are paying off.

“Let’s just sustain the drive, make sure we finish the drive and make sure we eliminate the little things that have been plaguing us,” Krassman said. “Which is ball security, offsides, those little things. My goal always is to do the little things right and we’re starting to figure out how to do those little things the right way.”

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