Franklin – The scoreboard didn’t match the effort in St. Martinville’s 3613 football season-opening loss at Franklin on Friday, first-year head coach James Dartez said.
“The scoreboard and the way the game went tells two different stories,” Dartez said. “We didn’t come out on top the way we wanted to, but the fight that our kids had (showed promise).”
Dartez said the Tigers are starting four freshmen on the offensive line. They’re good players but inexperienced and going up against players who are much older and more experienced.
“I’ve got babies up there,” Dartez said. “I’ve got two of my linemen who just turned 14 in July. We’re fighting. It’s not that they don’t want (to play), they’re just having on-the-job training. For a 13- 14-year-old kid to play with 15-, 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kids, we saw a lot of fight but we saw a lot of missteps — not holding my block as long as I could have, losing my man in pass protection. Just little small, correctable things. But we’re going to be all right.”
He was proud to see there was no quit in the team, he added.
“There was no point in the game where the kids just were on the sidelines saying that it was over,” he said. “We went for four quarters. We had a lot of kids encouraging each other. It was a 21-7 game midway through the third quarter. No one lost focus. No one lost sight of who was in the game.”
SMSH is fine-tuning everything.
“We’re not even a year into the rebuild,” Dartez said. “We’re two months into the rebuild. So we’re still trying to put guys into the right position to be successful. We’re still trying to be sure of positions on the field. The kids understand that. The kids are still buying into that.
“We had everyone show up today, on Labor Day when a lot of people are looking for excuses to be off, our kids were looking for excuses to get to practice.”
The Tigers travel to Breaux Bridge on Thursday to play their parish rivals in a non-district game.
“The parish rival is something these kids look forward to,” Dartez said. “A lot of these kids have been playing with and against guys from Breaux Bridge and Cecilia. There’s familiarity there. It’s a very healthy rivalry. These kids take this game extremely seriously.”
