The Yorkton Atom Gridders hosted the visiting Regina Kats at Kinsmen Century Field Saturday morning.
Despite the 27-13 loss to the Regina Kats, the Atom Gridders were happy to score a pair of touchdowns, the first for the young first year squad. Garion Miller and Jarius Pellat carried the ball into the opposition end zone.
Head coach Steve Variyan was pleased with his young team's performance. "Scoring was really nice. It really gave us a lift because finally we were able to get some points on the board," he says.
The Atoms were able to move the ball well at times, Variyan notes.
The best thing about Saturday's game was that a lot of the teething problems the Atom Gridders had earlier in the season are now behind them, Variyan claims. "When you start a new program and everybody has never played before, you're going through some baby things that other teams never have to go through again," he explains. All Atom Gridders are first year players while Regina team have third year players who know the game. The first five weeks Yorkton players were taught what's holding, what's a penalty, whats' offense, what's defense. "In the first game we had kids coming up and asking 'Are we on offense yet?'" Variyan says.
Now that the players are better acquainted with the game, coaches can concentrate on getting reps in on offense and running some plays. "It's nice to be able to do that," he admits.
Variyan says last game the defense played very well and the offense struggled. On Saturday, he feels the offense played well and the defense struggled a bit. "We couldn't contain a couple of players, Number 34 and Number 48 on their team," he says. The Atoms defenders are still struggling with the 'contain'. "A lot of teams run wide and we're just not doing a good job of containing," Variyan says.
The other thing was the defense didn't swarm tackle. Instead of just having just one person make the tackle while everybody else watches, coaches prefer that everybody get in on the tackle.
