Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna

As I said Monday, Jonathan and I are tracking down info on football teams as the summer gets going here. I packaged five teams together on Monday — Derby, Heights, East, Independent and Conway Springs — and was planning on doing the same today. But then I remembered — as if I could forget! — how vocal and loyal our Goddard readership is. So I decided to forgo my designated path and mix things up.

I talked to Goddard coach Roger Robben this afternoon about the Lions having their team camp last week and then heading to Fort Hays State at the end of last week. Here’s what he had to say:

He decided to have the team camp right before the team went to Hays because “the things we can talk to them about at the school and coach them on, then they go to the team camp and they’ll remember what we did. The year before, that’s a long time going into the next season. They will have forgotten a lot of that.”

At Fort Hays State, the university’s coaches run the camps and the drills, while the high school coaches work with other teams’ players on fundamentals. The college coaches set up competition periods, where Goddard’s offense, for instance, will go up against Carroll’s defense. They’ll go through plays, and it’s not super competitive because no one keeps score. There’s also 7 on 7.

Goddard lost 26 seniors from last year’s team, which went 9-3. But that doesn’t make Robben sick to his stomach. “You can look at programs that have been successful over the years. Carroll is a good example. The last 5, 6 years, (Alan) Schuckman has had a high number of seniors and been able to come back and be successful. It’s all in how you build it. Randy (Dreiling at Hutch) has had good numbers of seniors and been able to come back. We’ll have another 23, 24 seniors this year.

This group’s been a part of winning and success the last three years. Their expectations are high going into the season. And our schedule is not easy. We added McPherson and Blue Valley West (in Week 2). McPherson is part of our rotation with Division II. We had Campus for two years and then Ark City didn’t want to play us anymore. We wanted to play a City (League) school, but they have some agreement with Dodge City and Garden City. It would make more sense to play us and have good competition and to play close.

We have a little thing with the east now. Hutchinson is playing Rockhurst. Blue Valley West is the defending 5A champs. We have to play the east in the biggest game of the year.

I think the whole thing about Goddard football is I believe our kids take great pride and we have a good strong group with our younger kids.

By the way, I talked to City League athletic director Bill Faflick about the league teams playing Goddard.

Faflick said he’d love to have a CL team play Goddard. As for the western schools — North, East and Southeast play Dodge City, South plays Hays, Heights plays Great Bend and Northwest plays Garden City — the CL teams choose to schedule them because they struggle to get opponents.
“It’s a commitment from our school and a recognition by our schools that they need opponents to play. We need opponents, they need opponents, we don’t want to leave them hanging. We’ve said we’d play them and we’ve honored that commitment through the years.”

The western schools have struggled to find opponents, often going to Oklahoma or even Wyoming or New Mexico to find teams to play.

All right, so there’s the Goddard update. Got something you want to add? Got a coach you want to hear from? Let’s hear it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 2:47 p.m. and is filed under Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.