Last week’s loss to Wagner officially eliminated this year’s Boerne Champion football team from the playoff race, but that won’t change their approach to their final three games, according to head coach Keith Kaiser.
Champion visits district frontrunner Smithson Valley Friday, 7 p.m.
Kaiser said the team needs to work on improving in its final three games to gain experience for next year.
“With a young team, every rep is valuable and we’re going to go about it that way and we’re going to hold our standard,” he said. “Win or lose we’re going to pray with our opponent afterwards and we’re going to hold our standards high and expect our kids to meet them.”
Champion will miss the playoffs for the first time since the 2013 season. Since then, they’ve had a pretty good run of eight straight postseason appearances.
During those eight years, they won 11 games in 2014, 10 games in 2016 and 13 games in 2019 when they played in the state semifinals and tallied the most wins in Boerne ISD football history with 13 victories.
The Chargers won a district title in 2014 and shared another in 2016.
In last week’s game, Wagner thumped the Chargers, 47-7, and didn’t allow a Champion first down until late in the third quarter.
Kaiser said if a person stays in coaching long enough, they’ll be on both sides of those types of games. He added that the move up from 5A DII to 5A DI has been a big step, while schools like Wagner, New Braunfels Canyon and Smithson Valley have all moved down from 6A.
“The hard thing is we’ve been on the other side of these things where we’ve been the bigger, faster, stronger team,” he said. “When we made the jump (to 5A DI from DII), it’s going to take us a while to get to that level of physicality.
“These guys (Wagner) were a powerhouse in 6A and making playoff runs and now they’re down in 5A where it’s a lot different,” he said.
One thing Kaiser wants to see his team do is get more physical. At one point during the Wagner game, the coach called his team to the 50-yard line and told them to “fight back.” Champion defensive coordinator Blane Ellis also did a similar thing with the defense.
“When you deliver the blow instead of always taking it, you find more success through that and then you start building confidence,” Kaiser said. Early on we were just taking everything.”
Smithson Valley is 6-1 overall and 4-0 in district and Champion is 2-5 overall and 0-4 in league plays.
The Chargers enter Friday’s game in Spring Branch having only scored 7 points against Wagner. One thing the Thunderbirds did was to keep Charger QB Jordan Ballin in check.
Ballin is effective when he escapes from the pocket and uses his speed, but Wagner did its best to keep him in the pocket, something Hays did effectively. “Hays put the blueprint out there and all of a sudden everybody said, ‘we’ve got to keep him in the pocket,’” Kaiser said. “That’s tough for him because those guys are big and the throwing lanes are tougher, but he still competes.”
Ballin did get loose against Wagner and hit a 27-yard touchdown pass to Chase Riha in the end zone.
Even though the defense gave up 47 points, the Chargers came up with five turnovers after Ethan Stanley, Tony Graves, Hayden Niemeyer, Andrew Simmons and Luke Rossi came up with fumble recoveries.
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