(Oakland) Davis County and Riverside are located nearly four hours apart, but they each had one important thing in common. Both football teams were in search of a week 6 football opponent and thus the Mustangs and Bulldogs will get together at a neutral sight on Friday.
Central Decatur High School in Leon will be the location for this 6:30 p.m. kickoff. Coach Darrell Frain and his squad are tickled to have a foe. “It was kind of an interesting week for us. We thought we had Gibbon, Nebraska. We thought it was a done deal. Then on Wednesday morning they backed out. Within the hour Davis County AD Dave Mason gave us a call and said they were open. He was willing to set something up and look for a neutral site.”
Coach Frain and the Bulldogs desperately wanted to avoid having an open date. “If you’re really beat up sometimes you like to take those days off, but you kind of lose that intensity level and you let down and relax a little bit. Sometimes a week off isn’t always so good. I’d rather compete and have hard practices and get after it and keep getting better and I think that’s what this does for us.”
4-1 Riverside moves up two classes to take on this 3-1 squad. “We got tape on them yesterday. They are a really big offensive line. They go unbalanced with four backs in the backfield and the very next play they’ll spread it out and go empty with no backs in the back field. It gives us a lot of challenges on short notice. They look pretty good. It’s a 2A school that’s 3-1. Just raising up in class level is going to be a big challenge for us.”
The team has actually spent practice time this week preparing for three different opponents, including a West Hancock team that they never had any intention to play this week. So why West Hancock? “I asked the team last Friday because we had an idea this might happen. I said ‘Who was in the state finals last year?’ They said West Hancock so we decided to prepare for West Hancock.”
That in itself says a lot about where this program striving to get. “Even when we were struggling early on that’s one of the things we talked about when I got here. We are preparing to be state champs. Is that ever going to happen? Who knows, but we are going to prepare for that. When you get the kids thinking that way it doesn’t really matter who you play.”
Riverside was scheduled to take on AHSTW this week, but the Vikings had to cancel. The Bulldogs close out the regular season next week at home against SW Valley in a very important district game that we’ll have on KSOM.
