While the outcome wasn’t close to what they had hoped, the Madill Wildcats were able to fully honor six seniors for their undaunted efforts for the program during an extremely challenging 2025 gridiron season.
Ramiro Rangel, Landon Clutter, Brayden Gray, Braxton Gimenez, Yulian Diaz and Aaron Diaz were fully recognized prior to the season-ending 57-0 loss to Bethany, but will be remembered for a long time.
“I am super proud of those seniors,” head coach Wade Couch said. “They did exactly whatweaskedofthem.Those six were able to finish with heads held high through all the adversity we faced this year. They never wavered. They were always willing to practice and give their best effort even though we had a gauntlet of a schedule.”
“Even in our last game on Friday, the kids played their hearts out despite facing a very challenging situation. The attitude and effort was good. It was just a case again of one bad thing happening and then things snowballed.”
AlthoughtheWildcatslost the services of the six solid seniors, they will return a host of experienced players that were able to pick up invaluable playing time during the course of the season. After having three different head coaches over a three-year period, the Wildcats will go into this offseason with some stability and the system already in place for the second campaign under the leadership of Couch.
That trek is expected to begin in earnest following Thanksgiving break for a crew that will not be moving on to other sports.
“Wearegoingtomeetwith them to lay out our offseason plan,” the Madill skipper added. “We will have a lot back with a year of varsity experience. Weneedtoseemore improvementfromthemnext year to build off but we are excitedabouttheirfuture.We also have 27 eighth graders and are expecting all of them to play next year. We hope to have some guys come back next year as well that elected not to play this season. That should help increase our numbers considerably.
“We are going to get started getting ready for the 2026seasonafterThanksgiving break. Their offseason program will be geared toward football. We are going to develop some stability and can’t wait to get started for next year. We already have clinics lined up and different ideas to implement. We are really looking forward to it.”