When Great Bend High School’s football team takes on Garden City tonight, it will be the Panthers’ first game since opening the season two weeks ago.
Strange as it seems, it’s almost like the Panthers (0-1) are starting their season all over again.
Well, almost.
“It feels that way,” Great Bend head coach Bo Black said. “It just seems so long since we played our first game, and it’s a little bit of a concern.
“At the same time, we’ve had an extra week to get better, but after (tonight’s) game, the season is already a third of the way over and it really doesn’t feel like we’ve even started.”
Fourteen days have elapsed since the Panthers lost to St. Thomas Aquinas, 52-28, on Sept. 5 to open the season.
Aquinas (2-0) is one of the top-rated teams in Class 5A. The biggest eyesore for the Panthers was their defense yielding 522 yards of total offense to the Saints two weeks ago.
“Coming out of Game 1, we had a lot of things we have to improve on and we’ve had an extra week to address those things,” Black said. “You get to a point where you want to go find out what kind of a football team you have. We’re going to find out a lot about ourselves (tonight).”
The Panthers countered with 308 yards of total offense against Aquinas.
“I do believe that we played just an outstanding opponent in Week 1,” Black said. “Offensively, for an opening game, I thought we played OK. There’s a lot of things that need to be improved on.
“Defensively, we go back to that football game and we didn’t think we were very physical. We thought we were very soft defensively, and we’ve tried to improve that over a two-week period. But you never really know until you get lined up against an opponent. That will be one thing that we are really looking to rectify is the fact that we were soft in our first football game.”