OAKMAN – When Oakman takes the field tonight against Sulligent, coach Ryan Hall’s team will be lacking one significant benefit from a year ago – experience.
The Wildcats have spent fall camp building a team that will be without 13 seniors from 2021. Despite the lack of experience, Hall is pleased with what he has seen from his team leading up to game week.
“We’ve had great participation in the summer,” he said. “Our attendance has been better than it’s probably ever been. We’ve had good energy and everything. We’re pretty healthy. We’re just inexperienced. We have a lot of guys that haven’t played a lot of football.”
Oakman will return just three starters from last year’s team, which made it to the second round of the Playoffs before losing on the road to Saks, 22-36. With so few starters returning, it’s created more competition within the program as every position is open. If someone is wanting playing time right now, regardless of age, now is the perfect opportunity to step up and earn it, according to Hall.
“We’re kind of starting back from square one,” he said. “We have some guys that haven’t played football since toy bowl, so we’re just going to have to go through those growing pains.”
Hall said that the team, being as young as it is, is just going to have to go through those growing pains. However, he feels that the team is “further along schematically and assignment-wise than we’ve ever been at this point.”
“The physical side of it is what is going to have to catch up,” Hall said. “We’re going to have those lack of experience types of mistakes, we know that. We just have to coach as much of that out of them as we can in practice, but you’re not going to get it until you do the real thing.”
The real thing comes tonight on the road against Sulligent, a team Oakman hasn’t played since 2013 when the Wildcats wont 41-7. The series is tied at 2-2 all-time since 2008.
Leading Oakman’s offense onto the field will be Trace Cagle, a sophomore. But Cagle is not expected to be the only one to see time under center.
“Trace Cagle, he has been our quarterback. But we also have Caden Aaron that’s done a really good job in fall camp,” Hall said. Both quarterbacks bring something different to the offensive playbook and that is something the Wildcat coaching staff is looking to take advantage of.
“If a guy has a skill set, we want to use that,” he said. “If one guy can throw some and another guy can’t, we want to use him some in the throw game. If one guy can run a little better, we want to use all of their skill sets. I think both of our guys, Caden and Trace, both do a good job having a presence in the huddle, making sure we’re lined up right and understanding what we want to do offensively.”
Tyler Thomas comes in to 2022 as a freshman after starting as an eighth-grader a year ago. Hall said Thomas will have to learn to be a “senior” for this team defensively.
“He’s got to emerge as the guy that gets the strength called right,” he said. “He’s got to be the guy that gets us lined up right. All of those little details, he’s going to have to take charge in that.”
The Wildcats are a perennial playoff team, entering 2022 on an 11-year playoff streak. They are also a team that, last year, was able to rely on experienced players to be able to adjust on the fly, fix a broken play and make something out of nothing.
“We don’t necessarily have that right now because they’re young,” Hall said. “So we’re going to have to rely on each other and truly be a team.
“Whether they’re older and they have high expectations or they’re younger and they don’t really know any better, I really want is a bunch of guys that want to play together and want to play at Oakman and that want to compete. I want them to not be worried about exterior stuff and want to just throw down and get after it. If we’ve got that, we can live with it and will be okay.”
Oakman opens their season tonight at 7 p.m. at Sulligent.
