The Sacred Heart Saints got their senior football season started this past Thursday (September 3) when they made the nearly half hour jaunt down Highway 10 to do battle with their rivals the Melville Cobras in SHSAA nine-man exhibition football action.
Unfortunately the Saints were left stricken by the Cobra venom, surrendering 28 points in the first half before eventually falling 40-6 in a game that Saints head coach Trent Senger was using more for evaluation purposes than anything else. “In an exhibition game you really just want to evaluate the players. You want to get them out there. Sure we might have made a couple of mistakes in the first half, but what we were doing was trying to get all of our kids into the game and get everybody time so we can try to evaluate them,” Senger told Yorkton This Week. “We had some mismatches with our little guys against their starters, but we saw what we wanted to see, we saw some progression and we had a lot of kids play a lot of positions they might not be used to.”
One position that Senger and his coaching staff were particularly interested in evaluating was the ever-important running back position and just who would take over for last year’s dynamic duo of Christian Flaman and Caleb Sutter, both of whom graduated at the end of the last school year. “We kind of had an idea as to who we were going to use there, but sometimes that changes and sometimes someone makes a case,” said Senger, adding that two players in particular definitely stamped their names as possible starting running backs. “Ethan Danyluk impressed us. We put him in the backfield in the third and fourth quarters and we really liked what we saw. He really showed me that he wants the ball.”
Austin Walkington also impressed the collective Saints’ coaching staff with his effort in the first half, before being moved to the quarterback position in the second half where he scored Sacred Heart’s lone touchdown. “He (Walkington) loves the ball and he’s a really good running back,” offered Senger, continuing, “In the third quarter we put him in at quarterback as we wanted to give him a little work out there and he really showed me that he can stand in there and play.
“He’s not afraid to get hit and he’s got some good legs so that was really nice to see and he’ll probably be starting somewhere for us on offence.”
Senger and company also took a long look at the quarterback spot, giving young grade 10 quarterbacks Jantz Sawatsky and Walkington the opportunity to see some action behind the offensive line. “For the first half we used Jantz Sawatsky and he did a good job, but the unfortunate thing for Jantz is that he had roughly one and a half seconds to do anything until we changed our offensive line and found a combination that was really working,” mentioned Senger. “Austin played in the second half and had all the guys that we now have decided on as starters, so he had the time to do things that Jantz didn’t. He did some really good things too, but we just need to continue to work with him and things should be fine.”
Senger and his Saints will continue to prepare for the 2015 SHSAA Nine-man regular season tomorrow (Thursday) at 4:00p.m. at Sacred Heart.
