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Coach Jeff Lloyd's Kettle Run program will take its lumps against bigger teams
Taking control of the Kettle Run football team would be considered a buy-low strategy if Jeff Lloyd were playing the stock market.
He has invested in a team void of seniors and rife with raw sophomores, planning to enjoy the ups and downs as the first-year program grows and hoping it produces a windfall of wins by November 2010.
But Lloyd also expects some immediate gains by the middle of this season, even if the Cougars' first experience a brief downward trend.
Kettle Run finished its preseason schedule Friday with a 69-7 scrimmage loss to Group AA John Handley, and future struggles seems likely with a regular season schedule that begins with Group AAA schools Liberty and Fauquier High and finishes with AA squads Eastern View and Sherando.
Kettle Run, a AA school itself, will play those teams this season as part of an independent schedule. In 2009, the Cougars will then join their first district, one temporarily named the Northeastern District. That Group AA district will be made up of Kettle Run, Fauquier, Liberty, Brentsville and Warren County after the present Northwestern District is split into two five-team districts.
Fortunately, between the behemoths that bookend Kettle Run’s 2008 schedule there is a more manageable lineup. The Cougars should be better suited to compete against smaller schools such as Covenant, Woodberry Forest, Nanesmond-Suffolk, Washington (WVa.) and Berkeley Springs (WVa.).
“There are going to be teams we match up with pretty well," Lloyd said Sunday, after the loss to Handley. "The hardest thing will be trying to keep the kids focused on 'It’s a process,' because for four or five games we’re not going to match up real well."
The Cougars had success against George Mason and Wakefield in a four-team scrimmage jamboree Aug. 15 — "We looked pretty good...I was actually shocked we played as well as we did offensively," Lloyd said — but their scrimmage with Handley could be a precursor of pain against the likes of Liberty and Fauquier.
Kettle Run started eight sophomores against Handley and trailed 35-0 after only 12 minutes of play. The Cougars’ offense couldn’t function at all because of relentless pressure the Judges put on sophomore quarterback Ritchie Gaitlin.
Sacks, throw-aways, run stuffs and fumbles resulted in great field position for Handley and the Kettle Run defense then struggled to tackle every ball carrier. The Judges took a 49-0 halftime lead by scoring many of their touchdowns on one-play drives consisting of 30 to 60-yard runs.
"We’re physically overmatched," Lloyd said. "It’s not a player issue as far as talent level...There’s a big difference physically between sophomore football players and seniors…And football’s a game that’s played in the trenches."
The Cougars performed better in the second half, when Handley inserted some second-team players, but Lloyd didn't want to focus on that too much.
"It’s hard to do because you don’t want to be into moral victories or anything like that," he said. "You expect to win every time you go out there, because if you focus on, 'We’re undersized' and 'We’re overmatched physically,' it’s a fine line."
In other words, the Cougars can have realistic expectations as a new program without a senior class, but they can't accept defeat or become discouraged and fail to give maximum effort.
“No one wants to get pounded like that, but that’s part of the process of building this program," Lloyd said. "There are some teams we're not going to matchup with physically, but as that calendar flips, those sophomores turn into juniors...
See the Wednesday print edition of the Fauquier Times-Democrat for the complete story.
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