Valley football set for N.S. school league

BY JOHN DECOSTE

Kings County Register

All Valley high school football teams – including Central Kings, the “new kid on the block” – are ready to give it their best shot for the 2008 season.

NKEC and Avon View are each entering their third year of competition in the provincial high school league; Horton began play a year ago.

At Central Kings, the fledgling Gators may be short on experience but they’re long on enthusiasm, according to head coach Jonathan Ingles, formerly head coach of the Valley bantam Bulldogs, who returns to coaching after taking a year off.

Ingles notes he had “about 31 players” to begin with, but the team “has been picking up one or two a day” as word continues to spread.

“I’m pleased so far,” Ingles said. “We’re not without talent” on a roster that includes a number of former Bulldogs as well as raw rookies.

“Our biggest hole is the lack of an experienced quarterback.” At the same time, he liked what he had seen to that point, and optimistically predicted, “we won’t go winless - that’s a definite promise.”

The Gators are scheduled to play their first league game this Saturday, Sept. 6 in Halifax against J.L. Ilsley, then play their home opener Sept. 13 against Horton, tentatively at Acadia with the time still to be finalized as the football Axemen are at home that day against Laval.

“We’ll be playing our home games at Acadia this season,” Ingles said, though he added, “we’re hoping by next fall to have a field ready here (in Cambridge).” Central Kings also has NKEC, Sackville High and Citadel High on its 2008 schedule.

At Northeast Kings, the defending provincial Tier 2 champion Titans enter year three of competition missing six or seven key players from last year’s team, including Jordan Tibbetts, Alex Sarsfield, Steve Arbuckle and MVP Marco Visentin.

However, as assistant coach and defensive coordinator Wally Archer points out, “due to the success we’ve had the past two years - and especially last year, we’ve had some very good athletes just show up as walk-ons.”

He suggested “our receiving corps should be our strongest ever, and though we’ve had to replace some key people, we had 16 linemen alone show up at camp.”

Archer expects NKEC to again be strong in all facets of the game.

“We have a number of ‘core players’ returning,” including quarterback Logan VanBlarcom and middle linebacker Isaac Ueffing, “who should be the quarterback of our defense.”

The Titans, thanks in large part to their performance last season, have moved up a tier and will generally play tougher opponents, including defending Tier 1 champion CEC (in their opener this weekend in Truro), though Archer noted, “depending on our record, we should be able to compete for either Tier 1 or Tier 2.”

NKEC’s home games will be Sept. 13 against Cole Harbour, Sept. 20 against Lockview, Oct. 18 versus Sir John A. Macdonald and Oct. 25 versus Halifax West.

At Horton, head coach Alec Hyndman is looking for better things this season from his Griffins, who went 1-7 in their first year of competition.

“We’ve only had 28 kids out, but we always pick up more once school starts.”

From what he had seen so far, Hyndman expects Horton to be “much stronger and definitely more competitive” than last season.

“Our goal is to go 4-4 – and, of course, better than that.”

The good news is Horton returns 10 starters on offense, including quarterback Mitch Long; five of six receivers and nine on defense. Lee Spence and Steve Fredericks on offense and Jeremy Griffin and Will Taylor on defense look like players to watch.

Horton’s opener is this Friday, when the Griffins host Avon View at Acadia at 7 p.m. The Griffins will play both Central Kings and Avon View twice (Avon View, which graduated a number of starters from last year’s squad, drops down a tier) and also have Halifax West, Cole Harbour and C.P. Allen on their schedule.

“I’ve already been able to tell from our first couple of practices that we’ll be better. It’s been a nice change from last year, when we literally had to teach some people the game.”