VERY proud of our announcers: Joe Gadison and Gerald Spencer. They really do a great job!!
The score looks bad, I will give you that, but its a little deceiving too.
What an amazing and exciting night for us. I know the game ended in a way that we were not happy with, but before I get to that, I want to point out the great atmosphere that we experienced.
I just LOVE Friday night football, there is nothing like it.
I love our tunnel, our Varsity football programs, I love our Varsity uniforms, I love the coaches with HEADSETS! and I love seeing Coach Bridges and Bonnie Edwards (one of his secretaries), loved our coaches wives jerzey's. Thought we looked pretty sharp! ha And its great having my little Raider Rousers there and them running out on the field with the players.
Loved that Deanna Rogers and I got our names announced for our birthdays- they accidently missed one- big Ed Butts has a birthday today!!
The ONLY thing that could have made the night better (besides a WIN) would have been if we had Fever Dream as our come out of the locker room song. I am still working on that!
Thought it was awesome to see Mr.and Mrs. Rouse doing the coin toss! What did you think about Mrs. Rouse's Dazzling jerzey?! I thought she looked pretty snazzy! Oh and we won the coin toss and we elected to receive.
LOVED my cute little Raider Rousers. I think they looked so cute running out onto the field with their little jersey's!
I didn't take much video of the game, but I do have one that I can't really post. It was the play in which our running back went down. Its a great shot and you can hear me in the back ground, saying, "OH MY GOD, COME ON, GET UP, OH GOD, PLEASE GET UP. GET UP, GET UP, GET UP" and the more I say "get up" the whinier I sound. Its pretty comical actually. But for the sake of our RB I will not post that play.
That play was the beginning of a long night of injuries ahead of us.
We started out, looking pretty dang good, for the last 2 weeks of our inaugural Varsity Season, we have had great opening drives, but can't seem to make anything happen. On 3rd down we started at the 20 yard line and went down and we fumbled and luckily recovered our ball on the Rudder 7 yard line. (thanks to Brady Spencer for that recovery:)
I think that our RB went down with an injury on 2nd down, Our RB is amazing and is talented and a big part of our offense and to lose him- even for one play is no good for us:) But, the show must go on, and we had to continue without our RB.
We didn't gain any yards on 3rd down, so on 4th down, we attempted a 15 yard field goal and that darn field goal attempt turned into a Ranger touchdown as the kick was blocked, tipped by a Rudder player and fell straight into the hands of a Ranger, who ran it down for a touchdown. Horrible for us Raiders, but that was really a pretty block by the Rangers.
This put Rudder up 7-0 on us.
Then on the kickoff, Botello took the ball to about the 30 yard line, and once again, our offense takes the field. Tai finds Logan Kinder and our #2 takes the ball to the endzone for a touchdown. We make out extra point and things are looking good.
I think its amazing that we lost our RB, a vital person on our team- and who is also a captain, and our team shook off that loss, and responded on the next drive with a TD. I get that you have to shake things like that off in football, but with a young, inexperienced team its nice to see that we can respond in a positive way and get results.
On the next drive, our defense forced the Rangers to punt on their first possession of the game. Raiders get the ball (I don't remember on what yard line) and Tai gets the ball once again to Logan Kinder, who had a hell of a 61 yard run into the endzone and we kick the extra point and it was no good. So at the end of the first quarter the score was 13-7.
We are feeling pretty dang good at this point. Its always good to score (duh, I know that's obvious) but what I mean by that is we were ABLE to score. Unlike last season when we couldn't score against Rockdale.
Our Offense and our Defense seemed to be getting it. They looked really good and I am getting excited. Fired up. We were getting after it and we looked good.
BUT things took a turn and I guess someone on Bryan Rudder's sideline lit a fire under someone's butt because they got after us in the second quarter.
at half time the score was 28-13
By the way- did any of you go to the concession stand? GREAT job by the volunteers in there. I walked down and was greeted with a VERY long line, but I was back in my seat in no time! and with some good nacho's!
Going into the second half, the Rudders received the ball and take it in for a touchdown 35-13
WE get another touchdown on 4th down, when Tai finds Wesley Lewis to make the score 35-20. By the middle of the 3rd quarter, we lost 3 more football players to injuries to add to our loss in the first drive of the game and we already had 1 starter out. ALL 3 of our captains were injured, and our team kept trying. We never gave up and that says a lot. We were moving the ball and we were putting points on the board- even until the very end.
The Rudder Offense was just too much for our defense and they racked up 62 points to our 27 as the gameclock ended.
It was a tough loss and I was dreading going down to see Josh for fear of crying. (I already had tears in my eyes during 3rd quarter and wanted to go give Josh a hug- the hug was probably more for me than him- I HATED last week, seeing Josh so frustrated) But as I got down there and watched the boys run out to give Josh a hug and told their RR fingers up as our Alma Mater played, I relaxed a bit. I listened to parts of Josh's after game speech and I remembered that he was right- Rudder is a legitimately good team. He didn't choose to play crappy teams in non-district, just to get a win in our books. This is practice and this is the time that you work out your kinks. Obviously we WANT to win, but these first 4 games are meaningless and don't count for anything. Rudder was in our shoes last year as a first year Varsity football team. They went 2-7. This is their first year as a true valid Varsity team.
So they are really inspiration to us in my opinion.
I know that some think that they ran the score up on us, but really, if the shoe had been on the other foot, Josh may have done the same thing. Being a new school, you have to establish some respect and they are trying to earn it and Josh didn't take the score personal at all. Truthfully, we were still in the game up until middle of forth quarter. They took a knee at the end with a little over a minute left and I thought that was pretty classy of them.
Bryan Rudder was GOOD. They were fast and they were disciplined and we are young and not as disciplined. That's not to be an excuse. But we are playing GOOD teams. Liberty Hill was a GOOD team and they went on to beat Cuero (who really isn't so bad either) and just last week Rudder defeated Taylor, who beat Vandergrift this past Friday.
I wish Bryan Rudder Rangers all the luck this season. They deserve it. They deserved the win they got and it was nice for us to play a great team to see where we stand. We have a lot of work ahead of us and its going to be a long season, but I believe in our team and our coaches and I think we can and will win games. Our time will come and we will show them all what we've got.
In the mean time, lets focus and work hard and get ready to play a great game and beat up Pfugerville Hendrickson Hawks this coming Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment