Mountain Cats ready to rumble against Wallace in season opener

By KATHY WOODFORD

Mineral Independent

The Clark Fork Mountain Cats football team will face their first opponent on Friday, Aug. 25, when they travel to Wallace, Idaho. Head coach Jeff Schultz said the game will be a good battle for his team.

“We’ve played them in camp and in passing league a couple of times,” he said. “We had wins and losses against them and this will be a good to prepare for upcoming games.”

Wallace is a bigger school with around 150 students. Schools in Idaho can have 160 students and still play in the eight-man league. There are five returning seniors this year for the Mountain Cats, where 28 members came out to play. Shultz said he expects the majority of them to stay on the team since no one has missed practice except for excused absences.

The Cats were supposed to play Hot Springs in the season opener, but Hot Springs, who were the six-man state champions last year, moved up to eight-man this year and they don’t have enough players to round out their roster. Instead they will just field a junior varsity team this year. (See brief below.)

As for the Cats, “We lost our line last year with Sterling Reese, Max Faydo, and Howard Nelson graduating,” Shultz said. “Plus we lost our skill guy, Nick Turnbull. Tucker McLees is the only one with experience from the old line. We have a young team made up mainly of sophomores and freshman. But we have a good team and it should be a lot of fun.”

Overall, he said the team has good speed and the players are pretty hungry to show what they’ve got. Freshman Brian Mask is also practicing to be a quarterback, along with returning senior, Isaac Warren. Last year there wasn’t a backup quarterback and he worried that if something were to happen to Warren he didn’t know what they would have done, “these two guys are talented, and we have more depth this year,” he said.

They’ve been holding two practices a day for the past few weeks, primarily in Alberton due to smoke from the local wildfires. With classes starting this week for Alberton, they will cut down to one afternoon practice. Assistant coaches are returning Charlie Crabb and Matt Doughty. Jordan Taapken will run video, Hannah Calloway and AJ Azure will be team managers. The Mountain Cats will also have a full junior varsity team. They will face Charlo next week at home.