by Jessica Cervantez
The West Sabine Tigers will be adapting to some big changes this football season.
Seven new coaches on staff and a new head coach, but the Tigers say they're ready to win more ball games this year. Head Coach Tod Stark has been a coach at West Sabine for six years now, but now he he's the leading man. "We have seven new coaches on our staff, the previous A-D and head football coach is a great man, great man of God, great friend of mine, at the last minute he had the opportunity to go and coach and be an assistant and have fun and not so many headaches, as goes along with the A-D." The athletes are pretty pumped about the new coach.
They say they haven't seen too many changes in coaching styles. Senior Calub Brown says promoting Coach Stark was a good idea. "We're learning new things...he's a good guy and knows what he's talking about." Junior Brien Birdwell agrees, "The only thing that has really changed was the words we use to describe the plays, but I'm not going to get into too much detail about that so that our opponents won't have the edge on us."
The Tigers have several skilled players returning and their whole offensive line is made up of Juniors, who are experienced. This year, they plan to put a whole lot of concentration on their special skills teams. "In the past, we've concentrated more on the special teams and we feel like last year two or three ball games, the special teams may have cost us the game, primarily the last playoff where we had the punt blocked and they fell in the end zone to win the ball game."
Coach Stark says the key to winning big games in Class 1-A and 2-A football is keeping all these guys healthy.
