(Greenfield) A whirlwind of a week for Nodaway Valley football will end with the Wolverines opposing Greene County.
Nodaway Valley’s regularly scheduled opponent was Ogden which has a high number of players out through contract tracing protocol. Here’s Nodaway Valley coach Duane Matthess, “Monday morning they were still saying they want to play. Monday after school Mr. Miller got a phone call from them saying there were going to have to pull the plug.”
So the hunt was on for a new foe and they were hoping to find someone locally that was in either Class A or 1A. They literally found out mid-practice on Tuesday that Greene County was locked in as the new opponent. “Unfortunately there just really wasn’t anyone that was close to us. It just so happened that Greene County lost DM Christian. I’ll be completely transparent, they were not my first choice to play. They are a larger school than us, just a few years ago they were a 3A school.”
Matthess admits he’d been exploring possible options and studying them on film over the weekend. It reminds him of the old playoff format which started the first round on a Wednesday. “Trying to get up to speed as fast as we can. Our message to our kids is it doesn’t matter who we face if we don’t clean up our mistakes it’s going to be a long night for us. So that’s been our focus before we get too wrapped up in what Greene County has.”
The Wolverines are trying to erase a sour taste from letting a 19-7 lead slip away last week in a 21-19 loss to Madrid. “As the night went on we just got worse and worse to be honest with you. It was a long film session. I told the kids to buckle in, because we need to fix this stuff. I don’t know if there was a play we blocked correctly all night. Some contributing factors were we had some kids out with sickness or appointments the whole week.”
