MT. IRON- The new-look nine-man North Woods football team had its first test of the season on Saturday at a multi-school scrimmage at Mt. Iron-Buhl.
The Grizzlies matched up against Mt. Iron-Buhl, Cook County, and Littlefork-Big Falls in a short field controlled format. Starting at the opponent’s 35-yard line, each school got the chance to run 20 consecutive offensive plays against their opponents’ defense.
For their first venture into the nine-man game in five years, Head Coach Joel Anderson was relatively pleased with how the Grizzlies performed.
“I thought we did a lot of good things,” Anderson said. “I put together a scripted playlist that was going to put a lot of stuff on film that I wanted to see, and we got some really good film out of it. It gives our guys a measure to see what we can improve on, what they were doing well, and how we were going to go about week one preparing for Lake of the Woods.”
The scripted play scenario put some constraints on prospective quarterback Trajan Barto, who was instructed by Anderson to sometimes throw the ball into coverage for the benefit of seeing a particular play develop on film. When his receivers were open, Barto showed good accuracy in putting the ball where they could catch it.
“It was more I don’t care if this goes wrong and they end up with an interception, I want to see it on film to look at our alignment and routes,” Anderson said. “He’s a junior and he’s been primarily a receiver up until this year, but he’s the guy with some of the most experience and knowledge of how I call plays and where players are going to end up. He’s turning into a great leader back there.”
Barto will primarily be targeting receivers John Warren and Mason Rutchasky and tight ends Rogelio Noyes and Junior Nick Abramson, a former guard, brings some bulk to the running back corps.
“He moved up last year to be one of our featured backs in the backfield,” Anderson said.
Running alongside Abramson will be Kaden Gornick.
“He’s a very talented running back,” Anderson said. “They’re two very bruising backs, they’re both very strong kids and great runners.”
The offensive line is still somewhat in flux, but John Danielson looks to have secured the center position and senior Noah Westman will be the undisputed leader in the trenches.
“Noah started every game for us last year as a defensive tackle and as left guard,” Anderson said. “He’s a big, strong kid, very fast and very athletic. We can kind of move him around and we can pull him – we can do a lot of things with him.”
And while the overall size of his prospective linemen may be smaller than some Grizzly fronts of the past, this year’s group acquitted themselves well on Saturday, opening some good holes for their backs and providing protection for Barto.
“We’ve got some very talented linemen,” Anderson said. “From day one in practice we’ve been working with our guys to make sure they’re balanced on the line, that they’re making their reads, and that they’re communicating.”
On defense, the Grizzlies got in some good licks but were prone to giving up big plays against offensive sets that were unfamiliar to them. Anderson has talked in the past about how nine-man defensive roles are not as clearly defined as they are in 11-man football, and he saw a lot of players looking around instead of instinctively reacting to the ball.
“It was a challenge in some of those scrimmages,” Anderson said. “Because we are young we had a little bit of a challenge making those pre-snap adjustments to get lined up correctly. We haven’t had any experience in five years what is going on with a lot of these groups, so we were pretty green in terms of knowing exactly how to play them.”
But that’s the value of getting the scrimmage down on tape. The Grizzlies spent Monday watching film, and shoring up those oversights was part of the agenda.
“I think a lot of the things that were causing us some headaches on defense on Saturday are going to be cleaned up for Thursday night,” Anderson said, refencing the nontraditional season opener against Lake of the Woods.
Thursday’s game will be played at North Woods, with kickoff scheduled for 7 p.m.