Timberwolves Beat Spearville, Set for Playoffs

The South Central football team took care of business to close out the regular season with a 62-6 win over Spearville Friday night.

Now comes the playoffs, in which the Timberwolves will host a bi-district game against South Gray Thursday night. South Gray is 1-7 for the season with its only win coming against Sublette, 28-8, on Oct. 2.

“It’s playoffs,” said head coach Brett Westrup. “And like I (said before), these boys have been there. They’ve done that. They understand that.

“This isn’t like this is our first rodeo or we’re playing a bunch of young guys. This is a real seasoned veteran group that they understand what playing in November means.”

Coda Lindsay has 135 yards rushing on six carries with two touchdowns, Easton Huck had 97 yards rushing on seven carries with two touchdowns and Parker Price had a 6-yard touchdown run. Huck completed eight of 10 passes for 86 yards and three touchdowns and Price had 79 yards receiving on six catches with three touchdowns.

On defense, Wiley York, John Willems and Judd Petty each had five tackles, Willems and Colt Yoder each had a quarterback sack, Price had an interception returned for a touchdown and Dominic Macias had a defensive fumble recovery.

Westrup said it was good to see the Timberwolves play well against the Lancers to close the regular season. He loved how the defense played in particular.

“I think we only gave up one first down all game, and that was kind of there at the very end when they scored, when we had a lot of young kids in,” Westrup said. “But our plan going into that game was, you know, get stops on defense, and we knew if they didn’t do anything else good, they had a really good punter.

“And so, our plan was just to let them punt the ball, and we weren’t going to have a return, and just use that opportunity to move the ball and force ourselves to have to move the ball 40, 50, 60 yards down the field and kind of have some drives.”

He said that it gave the Timberwolves a chance to try some new formations they worked on in practice the past week. Westrup said the players looked good in running those formations.

“We worked on some different plays and used a few different personnel packages,” he said, “just to kind of look at different personnel packages for possibility in playoffs, and I think the boys did really well at all those things.”

He said that Spearville had a lot of size and, while the Lancers aren’t as good as they have been in past season, the boys didn’t take them lightly and lose focus.

“A lot of these kids that are starting for us, they’ve been starting for two, even three years, and they all know what this time of year means,” Westrup said.

“They know that we might have some good games, we might have some bad games, but they know what they got to do in practice to make sure that they keep able to take care of business on Fridays, and even if the team isn’t going to be that great, they know that it’s more important for us to focus on what we can control and not worry about who we’re playing.”

The things they can control, the head coach said, are intensity in practice, focus in practice and making sure they get better at each individual position. He said that’s exactly what the players did this past week.

“I really don’t have to harp on them much because they’ve been through there,” Westrup said. “They’ve been there, done that.

“I mean, like I said, this group of seniors we have, I mean, they were the first group — they were freshmen when we won the first Sub State game in school history, and they’re the only team that’s ever been to three Sub States. And so they kind of know what it takes to get through the week, even though they know that the opponent may not be that great.”

South Gray, the Timberwolves’ first playoff opponent, is a bit different than the teams that South Central has seen in recent weeks. Rather than a team with a lot of size, the Rebels are an athletic bunch of players who run things a bit differently than some of the recent teams SCHS has faced.

“They’re going to do some things that we really haven’t seen before,” Westrup said. “I’m not really sure what they’re trying to accomplish, but maybe that’s what they’re trying to do is just kind of confuse everybody.

“Defensively, it’s really hard to get a hard read on what they’re doing. And so we’ve just got to go into that game prepared, knowing that, you know, we may see a three front. We may see a four front. We may even see a five front.”

The head coach said that the Timberwolves will need to stay with their schemes and know who they have to block.

“They’re not very physical, but they (Rebels) are pretty athletic,” Westrup said. “So we’ve just got to use our physicality to impose their will and make them shut down early.”

One thing the head coach expects to do this week is “making the playbook a little smaller” on offense and focus on the things that the Timberwolves have excelled at.

“I’d rather be really good at a few things instead of great at a lot of things,” Westrup said. “And so we’re just taking those things that we’re really good at and just trying to get better.”

The Timberwolves will get to host a playoff game as long as they keep winning. But that means keeping the focus on the current opponent and Westrup said his players understand that.

“We’re just going to keep getting better with ourselves each day,” he said. “You know, the process is more important than the product. The process involves practice and individual time and we’re just going to keep getting better at that.”