Comfort still trying to get in first game

It’s back to the drawing board for the Comfort football team.

The Bobcats will try to play their first game of the year Friday at home after last week’s season opener in Brackettville was called because of the weather.

CHS hosts Dilley Friday at Bobcat Stadium, 7 p.m.

Comfort and Brackett were set to take the field last Friday but lightning strikes moved them to the locker room.

They waited it out and it looked like it might clear up and they were hoping to take the field by 9 p.m., but more lightening showed up and knocked out their lights and scoreboard, so they called it.

Comfort coach Jay Rieken said the team was obviously disappointed and added that there weren’t a whole lot of positives that came out of it, other than one thing.

“The pizza was fresh after the game, that’s about it,” Rieken said.

The coach said one negative is that he hasn’t seen his team play a live game as they enter the second week of the season.

“That first game is a good starting point to see what kind of team you have, nothing happens until you see it live,” he said. “You can say, ‘that doesn’t look good,” or ‘let’s add to it,’ but we don’t know. Seeing kids in game situations and seeing them in scrimmages is two different things. You can practice and scrimmage all you want but it doesn’t matter.”

Rieken said he knows it’ll also affect their conditioning as they head into Friday’s game and added that since they don’t have Game 1 film, he won’t be able to get film from Dilley’s opener last week since it has to be an even swap.

All Rieken can trade with Dilley is film from scrimmages. From what he’s seen on film of their scrimmages, Rieken said Dilley appears to be similar to the last two seasons when they were in the same district.

“They look about the same,” he said. “They don’t do a whole lot but they do it well.”

Dilley defeated Sabinal in their opener last Friday, 46-0.

In their two district meetings, Comfort and Dilley split their games. In 2023, they beat Comfort 26-21 and in 2022, Comfort won 34-20.

Rieken said there are life lessons they can glean from what happened last Friday.

“There was nothing we could do, hopefully it’ll be a learning experience,” he said. “The same thing can happen this week, you can’t take games for granted.”