Warriors entertain Wilson tonight for Homecoming, district opener
The Webbers Falls Warriors will begin the most important games of the season tonight when they open District BII-4 play with their homecoming game against the Wilson (Henryetta) Tigers.
Webbers Falls coach Trent Holt said it’s extremely important for the Warriors (3-2), who lost last Friday night 72-68 on the road against the Savanna Bulldogs, to come away with a districtopening victory.
“You want to be playing at home in the playoffs,” he said. “If you’re second, you’re at least playing the third-place team from the other district (District BII-3) at home. You can look at high school football over the years in every class. About 95 percent of the time, No. 1 (a district champion) is going to beat a No. 4 (a fourth-place team from a district) at home. It’s about the same with the secondplace team beating a third-place team at home, which happens the majority of the time. Playing at home is really big. We would love to go win this one, and we have a really good chance. They’re not nearly as good as they were last year.”
The Tigers (2-2) have not played a game since losing 88–84 to Savanna on Sept. 12. They won by a forfeited score of 2-0 over Watts on Sept. 19. The Tigers, who opened the season with a 42-26 win over Crossover Prep on Aug. 28 before losing 44-24 to Destiny Christian on Sept. 5, have had essentially three bye weeks as they had no game scheduled on Sept. 26 or last Friday night.
“They’re definitely not as good a team this year,” Holt said about the Tigers. “They have some kids. Last year, they had three Shelburn brothers. Two of them are not playing. They have one of them, who is a senior and plays running back, receiver and quarterback. He’s pretty good. He’s probably a little bit faster than the kid (Savanna quarterback Aiden Totani) the other (last Friday) night. He’s good wherever he’s playing.
We’re in the same situation — it’s the quarterback-ran offense. They have a pretty good receiver. They haven’t played in three weeks. They’ve had a couple of cancellations on them. When they went to Savanna that (Sept. 12) night, they just had eight players. A game or two before, they had 11 or 12 players.”
Holt said the Warriors will need to play a much more sound game than in last week’s road loss to the ’Dawgs.
“We’re definitely going to have to play well,” Holt said. “We will have to stop their quarterback. We have to tackle way better than we did (against Savanna). I told them (last Friday night) if we can’t stop their quarterback, we’re not going to win. He made some plays, but we just didn’t tackle well at all. We probably missed 20 tackles (against Savanna). We have to win the turnover battle, and we have to tackle.”
For the second straight week, the Warriors will be without tight end/ linebacker Thadan Yandell, who likely will be having surgery in the near future to repair a broken ankle.
“Thadan ended up with a broken ankle,” Holt said. “If we had Thadan last Friday night (against Savanna), we win. He’s big and strong, and he would have made big plays at middle linebacker. When he went out, our tight-end passing game went out with him. We would have ran some (offensive) plays with him. With him not there on offense and defense, it really hurt us. They (doctors) told him he will be out six to eight weeks.”
