At times, the Republic Tigers looked pretty good during their Friday night jamboree at Camdenton. At other times, they looked not so good. But one defensive play in particular showed new coach Wes Beachler that the players are buying into his philosophy.
“I’m really proud of Darion Hall. He epitomized what I want our kids to be,” Beachler says. “He smoked the quarterback on a legal, clean hit. Then the quarterback tried to shove him off and Darian just got up and stuck his hand out to help him up, and the quarterback kind of waved his hand off. Darion just walked away.
“We want to play physical. We want to play hard, fast, and with class. That’s what he did,” Beachler says. “Snap to whistle, we play football. After that, we help them up. If they don’t want to take the help up, we play football the next down.”
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Besides the standout play by Hall, Beachler says he saw a lot of other things to like in the Tigers’ first performance against other teams.
“I thought the first group of offensive line, even some of the second tier that went in did a nice job up front. There’s a lot to learn and the learning curve is tremendous sometimes,” Beachler says.
“I liked the way our backs ran. Even when we didn’t have great seams for them to run through, or even when they picked the wrong seam to run through, they ran hard and physical, and I liked that. I thought all our quarterbacks did a pretty good job of running the offense, particularly the top three.”
The Tigers broke off two long runs in their opening series against West Plains, including a long touchdown romp by Colton Peltz. Tryston Ellison also had a good run against the Zizzers.
Against Eldon, the offense failed to move the ball at all. On most of their 12 offensive plays, they were stopped at the line of scrimmage or in the backfield. But Beachler says looks can be deceiving, and he’s not worried about his team’s inability to get anything going against the Mustangs.
“I had a script I was going to run, regardless. I wanted to run certain plays,” he says. “If that had been an actual ballgame, we would have trapped the death out of them, and they would have had a tough time stopping the trap. So believe me, the coach in me, when I saw that front, wanted to run an inside trap and we didn’t do it. We ran the script.
“From the stands, they’re probably thinking, ‘Holy cow, this offense looks terrible. Eldon must be really good.’ But what it comes down to, I was going to run my script, off-tackle and sweep. They loaded the box to the outside, so in an actual game, we’d have run a fullback trap to death until they got out of that.”
The Tigers may have put together their best defensive performance at the start of the night against West Plains. They contained Eldon for the most part, except for two big gains on runs to the outside. Camdenton put together the most consistent drives of the night against the Tigers.
Republic has one more week to tune up. The Tigers will travel to Springfield Central next Friday for the season opener. Beachler says for now, he’s glad to see buy-in from his players.
“I saw a lot of seniors that are playing like they believe in what we’re doing, and that’s good, because you’ve got to have those kids,” he says. “And I saw a lot of younger kids play older than they are. (I saw) quite a few good things, honestly.”
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