With baseball season over early, the Noxapater football team is well into its spring training.
Veteran coach Casey Orr said the Tigers have been going for two weeks already and he likes what he has seen so far.
“We are going three days a week and have done that the last two weeks,” Orr said. “We are trying to keep them fresh. It has gone really well so far. We finished the year with 24 players and have got about 30 kids out which is a good number for us. We are seeing what the young kids can do. We didn’t lose a lot off of last year’s team with the six seniors so we are bringing back the majority of of team. I like the nuclear we have coming back.”
Orr said the Tigers have worked cutting down turnovers with quarterback K.D. Carter, who rushed for 1,143 yards on 136 carries last year and scored a team-high 21 touchdowns.
“We are just trying to be more crisp on offense,” Orr said. “We are still a wing-T team but going to be out of the gun look. We had a lot of success with the quarterback and are expecting him to come more into his own.With Raheem Hathorn coming back, we feel like we have two of the premier skill guys in the district coming back.”
The Tigers will participate in a May 17 scrimmage at Ethel where they will play Choctaw Central and Ethel.
“We had a good year last year and are trying to build off of that,” Orr said. “We feel like we are bringing back more than we lost. We have some good lineman coming back and good skill people. If we can stay healthy, I think we can be extremely competitive in 1A. I think it’s more wide open than it has been.”
