Last week’s loss to Victoria East eliminated the Champion football team from playoff contention, but Chargers coach Blane Ellis said it’ll be business as usual heading into the final two weeks of the regular season.
The Chargers play Wagner Thursday at Rutledge Stadium in a TV game scheduled to start at 7 p.m.
“Our focus is on right now, the present,” he said. “We’re going to continue with our guys and my focus is on taking care of the guys who have been in the program and invested in this season. Right now, we’re going to focus on the Chargers in 2024.”
Basically it just means that starters will play regular minutes.
Ellis said playing on a short week is no big deal. In a strange quirk to their schedule, Champion also plays next Thursday to close out the regular season at home against Pieper.
“It changes our routine a little, not a whole lot,” he said. “We have a saying that by the end of Wednesday, the hay is in the barn. If we played Friday, Thursday would just be a walk-through kind of thing anyway.”
Pieper is leading the district at 5-0, Smithson Valley is 4-1, followed by New Braunfels and Seguin at 3-2.
Wagner and Victoria East are 2-3 and trying to get into the top four to make the playoffs.
The Chargers are 1-4 and Mac is 0-5, so even if Champion won their last two that would only tie them with NB and Seguin in the standings, but both have defeated the Chargers this year and own the tiebreaker.
Champion can play the role of spoiler Thursday and hurt Wagner’s playoff chances by beating them, but Ellis said they don’t approach a game with a revenge angle or by trying to ruin somebody else’s season.
“We look at it like let’s go get another win,” he said. “We’re not focused on winning so that it spoils somebody’s season, we’re just focused on winning and taking care of ourselves.”
The Chargers are coming off a 28-10 loss to Victoria East and the 10 points they scored matched the season low of Sept. 20, when they only tallied 10 against Smithson Valley.
Three turnovers on its first three possessions really hurt their chances last week.
“We turned it over on our first three drives and on the fourth drive we gave it back to them after they stopped us on a 4th and 1,” Ellis said.
Three of their four district losses have come on the road. Their other 13-5A DI setback came to Seguin at BISD Stadium but the Chargers scored 66 points in that game.
Ellis said he wasn’t really sure why they couldn’t hold onto the ball last Friday.
“We’ve taken care of the football pretty well this year and those were uncharacteristic turnovers,” Ellis said. “It’s frustrating, you can blame it on youth or on a long road trip, but no matter how young we are and how far we travel, we have to take better care of the ball.”
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