Every August, I get it regularly.
“Neil, we don’t have any depth.”
I understand totally, so when I pump out the football capsules for Class 5A, I’m a nice guy and attempt to come up with novel ways to indicate it as such. Light. Thin. Backup jobs available, inquire within. And so on.
Then there’s the case of Arickaree. The Class A 6-man Indians of Anton, who won Colorado’s first three 6-man titles from 1986-88, had been getting, well, thinner than Olive Oyl. They didn’t have enough players the past two seasons to field a team.
But there they were last Friday. After a five-hour trip to face Mountain Valley in Saguache for an afternoon game, they not only fielded a team, but won 33-16, their first victory since Oct. 10, 2008.
“We’re rebuilding,” Indians coach Dennis Koolstra said, and he was only half-kidding.
Arickaree was able to dress nine players. It originally had 10, but one suffered a knee injury during a scrimmage and is lost for the season. Four of the six starters were freshman. And they have no seniors.
So do Denver-area teams still think their teams lack depth, or do they live in another world?
“Everyone got to play. They all played a lot, and we had fun,” Koolstra said. “I thought they did a good job for our first game in a while.”
The northeastern-area farming community has more than lower numbers and isolation. There are real-life commitments. While the few Arickaree footballers of the past two years traveled the half-hour or so to Akron or Liberty “and got home during the week at 7:30 or 8,” Koolstra said, the dairy farmer has to make sure about 2,000 cows get milked three times per day.
If he can’t make practice, he doesn’t sweat it. He and the Indians are lucky to have as many as five other coaches who can oversee it, including a couple from their state-title years.
Hence, Koolstra said, “our coach-to-player ratio is pretty good.”
A co-op situation had been discussed to keep at least some semblance of a program running, he said, “but co-oping is hard. The schools really are the communities out here. We were rivals before . . . but to get everybody to agree to it is hard.”
The Indians, whose numbers in school have grown exponentially — Koolstra estimated “15 or 16 boys when we peak out” — will host Pawnee on Friday.
Their revival will serve up some home cooking, perhaps the most necessary ingredient to keep it going.
“When you don’t have a sports program, a lot of these kids will go somewhere else,” Koolstra said. “We have to be able to keep them here.”
Footnotes.
Take a bow, all of you Center Vikings. Although it’s a week into the season, they sit atop the 1A Southern Peak standings after defeating Ellicott 7-6 in nonleague. It also snapped a 22-game losing streak for Center, which had been outscored by a combined 873-245, or an average of 39.7-11.1. . . . Former Valor Christian quarterback Brock Berglund’s younger brother, Brandt, has transferred to Chaparral. . . . J.T. Leidholt, who previously played for Rocky Mountain, has left Wyoming football and enrolled at Northern Colorado to play baseball. . . . Know who plays for Cherry Creek? Rod Smith Jr., and, yes, he’s exactly who you think he is.
