New faces and increased numberswereonfirmdisplay in Madill’s initial football scrimmage of the season last week as they hosted McLoud and Tishomingo at Blake Smiley Stadium.
The Wildcats suited up nearly 50 players for their first action against an outside foe, which was a huge improvement over the finish of the 2025 season. Most of the newcomers are in the learning phase but head coach Wade Couch was excited about what he saw from a lot of the new prospects in their debut.
“We are really excited about our participation increase and we may even add a couple more players before the season starts,” Couch commented. “A lot of these new guys have only had a couple of weeks of practice but you can definitely see the improvement every day. I’m extremely grateful that we have an extra couple of weeks of practice this year with no Zero week game. We’ll have a whole month of practice under our belts before the first game.
“McLoud has a lot of experienced seniors but our kids competed well. It was exciting to see them compete like that against people like that. We made some youthful mistakes but feel like we can eliminate a lot of those after we watch film on what we did wrong. The kids’ attitudes weregreatthough.Iamsuper proud of them at this point.”
Couch and his staff saw many things to be optimistic about even though the young Wildcats never found the end zone in the shortened live period.
He pointed to solid work in alignment on the defensive side, including a couple of new scheme looks that have been implemented in the offseason. Meanwhile on the offensive side freshman quarterback Marquis Ibarra made his varsity debut running the attack and shook off some early jitters to show pretty well.
Coaches also like the contributions of sophomore Rodrigo Cruces and Stephen Moreno in the running game. A much more experienced offensive line that got time under fire a season ago also showed well.
“I was extremely impressed with our defensive alignment,” Couch said. “The guys have much more attention to detail this year and a couple of adjustments we made looked like they will help us. The communication was really good for only a couple of weeks of practice for some but we have to do a better job of tackling. That’s usually a normal situation in the first scrimmage.
“I was disappointed we had to cut the scrimmage a little short because I felt we could have scored a couple times. We have so many new faces that are getting their feet wet, including Marquis at quarterback. Alex Garcia snagged a couple of passes and our running back looked pretty good. The more reps we can get against other competition the better we are going to be. We are excited about another opportunity to scrimmage and see how much we continue to improve this week.”
The Wildcats will be on the road this week and travel to Canadian for a four-way scrimmage with a couple of northeast Oklahoma foes in Hulbert and Chouteau. Action is slated to begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday.