A difficult football season came to an end on November 8 for Madill as the Wildcats dropped a 51-0 district verdict on the road at Class 4A’s fifth-ranked Bethany.
The Wildcats struggled to get much going offensively while the Bronchos took advantage of great field position in building a 29-0 lead after one quarter. They pushed that advantage to 45-0 at intermission and cruised the rest of the way and into the playoffs with an 8-2 record.
Making his second start at quarterback, Uziel Flores was under duress most of the contest, completing a pair of passes for 13 yards while tallying a total of six yards in 12 carries with sacks included.
Jackson Harper carried 10 times for 15 yards on the ground with Alexander Garcia grabbing one pass for 10 yards. Talyn Reames also added a catch for three yards.
“I thought Uziel did an incredible job coming in playing quarterback with as tough a position as it is,” head coach John Heavner commented. “Losing your starting quarterback makes it extremely difficult, but what he was able to accomplish with the limited amount of practice he had over the final couple weeks was tremendous. When you can’t be balanced it makes things tough and we just were never able to get the run game going. We’ve got to find a way to run the ball consistently in the offseason. That’s critical. I’m proud of our seniors. They worked hard and tried their best all season, which wasn’t always easy with all the injuries and limited number of folks at times. That’s all we could ask from them.
“There are 11 of those guys we have to replace, and a lot are linemen. We will have a lot of younger skills guys back. With all our injuries though we were able to get some freshmen and other guys a lot of reps for moving forward, which will help us. Our junior high finished the season 6-1 and had 45 players. There are a lot of talentedguysinthosegroups, but they are going to have to grow up fast in high school with the schedule we have to play. There are several others that didn’t play this year that are supposed to next season, which should help our numbers.”