The Winona Christian Stars started making final preparations to kick off the regular season this week.
Coach Ashley Kuhn said the Stars spent a lot of time working on themselves last week.
“I thought it was a good week,” Kuhn said. “We didn’t have a game so we were able to focus on ourself and spend time in the film room. We had some alignment issues that popped up against Pillow and we were able to work on that on defense. And the offense got to work on some different alignments that they might see from the defense and work on different blocking schemes. You get caught up blocking yourself and working against your front and early on you are trying to get better so you practice against your front but don’t often block against other fronts. We worked on those thing this week.”
This week, the Stars will hit the road for a two and a half hour bus trip to West Memphis, Ark.
The Black Knights played eight-man football last year but moved up to 11-man for this season. They essentially traded their schedule with Sylva-Bay’s schedule who moved down to eight-man this year.
Kuhn said he is worried because his team didn’t play in a jamboree last week and the Black Knight already have a full game under their belts.
“It’s not a team. That we played last year and don’t know a lot about them,” Kuhn said. “We got to go see them play Clinton Christian last week and were able to do a little scouting on them. What I’m worried about is they have played a game and we haven’t. That’s my biggest concern. They have a game under their belt and we don’t. There is a tremendous improvement from week one to week two and to me that’s a huge advantage for them. They made those mistakes that you make the first week and now have a chance to correct that.”
But Kuhn and his staff did get to see the Black Knights in person in a 38-6 loss to Clinton Christian. But Kuhn said that score is deceiving.
“The score was 38-6 but that’s very deceiving,” Kuhn said. “It was 6-0 and West Memphis is about to score and then throws a pick six and it changed the whole game. Then they get the ball to start the second half and did the same thing, threw another pick six. It was a competitive game but just got out of control. They have some athletes and have the tendency to make some big plays. They may not do much on offense and then hit a big play and that scares me.”
