Gans senior lineman says Grizzlies ready for Thursday opener

After going 1-9 last season and with more enthusiasm being brought to the team by second-year coach Gary Hixon, Gans senior lineman Leland Locust said he truly is ready for the 2025 season to commence, which it will when the Grizzlies entertain the Keota Lions at 7 p.m. Thursday at Grizzly Field for the Zero Week season opener.

“I’m pretty anxious,” Locust said. “I feel like we’re a better team. We’ve worked harder. I’m really looking forward to this season.”

Now that Hixon and the Grizzlies have been together for greater than a year, Locust said the expectations the secondyear coach has for his players is greater.

“Last year with Coach Hixon coming over here for the first time, I feel like he was trying to get to know us better the whole year,” he said. “This year, he knows us, and he knows what we’re capable of — so, he pushes us farther.”

Since the Grizzlies are playing a Zero Week game, there was only one preseason scrimmage for them, which took place last Thursday night in a six-way scrimmage at Canadian. While the Grizzlies may not have looked as good as everyone hoped, Locust still says the team is ready for “Friday Night Lights.”

“We didn’t do our best (last Thursday at Canadian six-way scrimmage), but I feel like we’ll do good,” the Gans senior lineman said. “The scrimmage pointed out things we needed to work on this week.”

Locust said he has some mixed feelings about this being the final football season as a Gans Grizzly.

“I’m happy because it’s my last year (at Gans) and I get to play, but also sad because I’ll be leaving the underclassmen,” he said.

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In last Thursday night’s preseason scrimmage at Canadian, that also featured Cave Springs (and new coach John Mays, former Vian softball and basketball coach), Midway, Graham-Dustin and Oklahoma Bible Academy, which is located in Enid, the Grizzlies did not score on offense and gave up touchdowns on defense.

Offensively, there were mistakes made, but they can get corrected.

“We had opportunities to have some big plays, and we’d either miss a block or not stay with a block from our offensive line or we just missed a hole or missed a pass,” Gans coach Gary Hixon said. “We had a kid wide open, and we overthrew a little bit. We had some opportunities, but we just didn’t take advantage of what we had. I thought we could have some success, and we did have some success. It was just not sustained. They (the mistakes) are very correctable.”

The same could be said for the Grizzlies’ defensive outing in Thursday night’s scrimmage.

“We gave up some scores,” Hixon said. “We gave up a pass or two. We dropped an interception. It’s correctable errors. It’s just some rules and some responsibilities. We only have two days to get ready for it because we have Keota on Thursday.”