Taking one giant step

The New Hampton football team gathered around their coach Friday night, and the disappointment was palatable.
The Chickasaws had just dominated the second half of its game with Waverly-Shell Rock, only to give up a late 80-yard touchdown run and end up on the wrong end of a 13-6 score.
Yet — maybe, just maybe — this was the game that turned the winless Chickasaws’ season around.
“We asked you to take a step, and you went a mile,” New Hampton coach Scott Frerichs said, and two days later, he was still reiterating the point.
“Our effort was a lot better, and I mean a lot,” he said. “We kind of  challenged them to embrace the culture of a football team and play like Chickasaws play, and they did that. … The team that played the hardest didn’t win, but we saw a lot of things we can build on.”
Waverly-Shell Rock may have come into the game unbeaten and ranked in Class 3A, but it was the Class 2A winless Chickasaws who came up with a supreme effort that just fell short.
“You can easily see that we have improved so much,” senior Tristan Sweitzer said after running for 130 yards on 25 carries and catching six passes for 58 yards. “The last two weeks, we’re showing that we can run the football and as hard as it was to lose to them, we know we can do this, we know we can make the playoffs.”
For the full story, please see the Sept. 18 Tribune.