Football preview
Immel hopes Falcons grow from adversity The simple truth for the Connellsville football team was the 2009 season was not good. Not to browbeat the Falcons, but the team understands that. Teams have down times, and the Falcons suffered one of the toughest seasons in their history last year by going, and scoring only 33 points while allowing 499.
Despite their difficulties, head coach Jeff Immel saw plenty of positives to build upon for the 2010 season.
“I’m very proud of the kids because they stuck together, and kept working to get better,” he said. “The staff kept working to keep everybody positive. The thing we have to do this year with the kids that are coming back is to get them to believe in themselves.”
Immel points out that will be one of the big obstacles facing the staff this season is teaching the players to overcome adversity. A couple of bad plays can have a real snowball affect when things are not going well.
“In half of our games last year we would have a bad quarter and let the game get away from us,” he said. “We didn’t know how to recover from that. I think with the work we put in during the off season, we’ll be able to face those situations a little better.”
Immel hopes the adversity faced last year will serve as a learning experience and a building block.
“These kids have always given us an effort,” he said. “Whenever we asked them to be here they are here doing everything we ask of them. We’ve got to get them to believe during the course of the game and the season, everything is not going to go your way and how do you respond to that.”
Immel pointed out some examples of how games got away from the Falcons.
“In the Uniontown game we had a touchdown called back that would have given us the lead. We had 10 minutes left in the game and didn’t respond,” he said. “Against Norwin we stayed right with them until the last four minutes of the first half and gave up two quick touchdowns. It went from a 7-0 game to a 21-0 game.”
He also added the Hempfield game when the Falcons trailed and another mistake cost them a touchdown that would have given them the lead.
“We were down 13-7 late in the second quarter. We were down on the one yard line and one of the kids did the wrong thing at the wrong time that cost us the touchdown that would have given us the lead at the half,” he said. “Physical mistakes are going to happen. We’ve got to stop the mental mistakes that put us in bad situations.”
Immel says the Falcons have to move away from the mentality of waiting for something bad to happen, instead of making something good happen. He says from what he has seen so far this particular group is making steps in that direction.
Immel says the numbers are down and the Falcons might not have enough depth in certain positions.
“It’s easy to survive when things are good,” he says. “There is a saying that goes ‘Character is who you are, not what people think you are’ If there is anything I think these kids have shown plenty of character because they have shown up and stuck it out.”
To that end Immel will rely on between 13-of-15 seniors to pull the team together. From there the Falcons start to get a little thin compared to previous years.
“We’re really hurting with numbers in our sophomore and junior classes,” he said. “If we were 9-0, everyone knows the numbers would be a little different. The best thing we can do to get our numbers up is to win. That’s the bottom line.”
Immel feels despite the lack of depth he will have some quality players in the starting lineup, allowing the Falcons a good chance to win some games this season.
“We have seniors returning like Matt White, Anthony May, Brandon Show, Ty Wildey and Steven Bush, all two-way starters,” he said. “We have several juniors back that started as sophomores. Guys like Seth Kozak, Andrew Schroyer, Brandon Freed and Nick Pittsment all got valuable experience and should be much better.”
Immel gives a lot of credit to his coaching staff for the time they put in with kids in preparing for the season. The most important thing for the Falcons is the old adage, one game at a time.