The Stevensville MT. Yellow Jacket Football program got off to a strong start this 2011 season with a convincing 29-0 victory over powerhouse Frenchtown. This was a great boost of confidence for the kids after losing to Frenchtown a year ago in a game that could have been tighter after really analyzing the game film.

After a strong off-season that saw many of the athletes improve by participating in the teamsportstraining.com off-season athlete training program, participate in other sports and attend the annual Yellow-Jacket summer football camp the athletes looked ready to play some football.

Some of the improvements in the off-season

Our quarterback Caleb (Boomer) Vance, Josh Lords and Josh Haynes all made it to the state finals in track last year so we have a very fast core of skill players. Zach Gavlak is much bigger and more improved in his second season. His brother Tyler worked hard in the off-season and will be a HUGE help! Josh Stevens is back and looks stronger than last year. Jesse Sims is a freshman with a lot of size, speed and athletic ability that looks like he could sign with USC if they came up to Stevensville and offered him a scholarship.

With a lot of younger players and some jitters of being the first game the team got off to a slow start but took care of the main objective, stay in a position to win the game. Once the team settled down they started to get some momentum by consistently stuffing Frenchtown’s running game and actually showing a promising running game of their own. Typically being known as a spread/passing team it was exciting to see a running game that can balance the offense out. The running game was sort of the achilles heal of the offense last year but with some good coaching and hard work by the kids improvement was seen.

As the game went on the defense just kept stuffing the run which was pretty impressive to see. The coaches came in with a little different game plan that was designed after really watching the film from the game a year ago. With Frenchtown being known as a wishbone/option type team and not relying on their passing game much an aggressive, gap controlled defense can have some success if the kids are willing to play hard.

One new thing that was pretty great to see was the use of some of the younger kids towards the end of the game. Last year large leads were far and few so many of the younger kids did not get to play much. With a large lead, these kids were able to get valuable game repetitions that are hard to come in practice.

All in all there were many promising things to see after watching the game film the next day. However there are many areas to clean up if the team wants to go deep in the playoffs and have a successful year!