The La Center football team has only given up one score in four weeks with three straight shut-out efforts as the Wildcats won 34-0 over the King’s Way Christian Knights on Friday, Sept. 27.
After their five-score win over the Knights, the 4-0 Wildcats have outscored opponents 158-7 since the start of the season.
Despite the dominant overall score in their week four performance, the Wildcats only led 7-0 at halftime. It wasn’t until the final 5 and a half minutes of the game that La Center pulled away with three more touchdowns for the 34-0 final score in the 1A Trico League matchup.
With the Wildcats’ own stellar play on defense, La Center head coach John Lambert gave a lot of credit to his opposition.
“I think King’s Way did a great job of preparing for us, and we didn’t really know what they’re going to do, and so it took a little while to adjust to it,” Lambert said. “I was really impressed with King’s Way. They have a good football team.”
As La Center forced some turnovers throughout the night and remained dominant on the defensive side of the ball, the Wildcats offense made some adjustments. Lambert said the Knights defense shut down his offense’s best plays, so after halftime he switched some things up and the team rolled into the second half with a five-play drive ending with a 19-yard Isaac Chromey touchdown run.
“They were overloading some of our plays that we like to run, and so I think we went away from that and then came and revisited different ways of running it and that took advantage of how they were defending us,” Lambert said. “We still need to work on things. We still need to get better, but I like how we finish.”
After two more Chromey punch-ins solidified a good lead in the fourth quarter, Lambert opted to throw in some junior varsity players to gain experience under the Friday night lights. Sophomore Nate Rembisz stepped in at quarterback to close it off and added a touchdown to reach the 34-point mark.
“I was really proud of the JV team with how they came in and scored at the end,” Lambert said. “We got a lot of good kids that can step up. … We didn’t want to take a knee with those guys. This is their chance to play. I was like, ‘Should I take a knee at the end of the game?’ It’s the JV. This is their only chance they get. If it was varsity out there, I would have done Wildcat victory, but, with the young guys, I wanted to get an opportunity to get in the end zone and compete. It’s always good to get the young guys in.”
With this week being La Center High School’s homecoming and a matchup with previous rivals Castle Rock High School, Lambert is looking forward to a tough competition and keeping his team on track in practice.
“They always have tough kids,” Lambert said of Castle Rock. “They have a really good quarterback. They’ve got some really good skill guys. We didn’t have a great week of practice, and it was a little frustrating. I think you could see that this week, and so we need to do better with ourselves in practicing this week.”
The La Center Wildcats will host the Castle Rock Rockets at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4, at La Center High School.
