Ready for some football!

On Friday night, Brett Mills, Jeremy Branham and I kick-off our inaugural season of the 1560 Game of the Week (on KGOW 1560-AM, of course) at Crusader Stadium on the campus of Strake Jesuit College Prep. Strake faces off against St. Thomas and there will be a lot of interesting subplots to this game.

Ron Counter’s Strake team is coming off a 2008 district championship in District 18-5A, but they lost some key contributors on both sides of the ball that they have to replace. Notably, 2008 QB James Scott is gone to SMU, and Coach Counter says that, for the first time in his career, he doesn’t know who his clear-cut No. 1 signal caller will be. We’ll likely see two—and possibly three—players take snaps under center for the Crusaders on Friday night.

Strake has also had to deal with more than their share of adversity in the weeks leading up to the season. They’ve lost some players to injury, and beyond that, they’ve had two players who have had to deal with health issues that go far beyond the average ankle sprain or bruised ribs.

Defensive lineman Kaosi Egbunike has been diagnosed with and treated for a heart condition. While he won’t be available on Friday, Egbunike is, by all accounts, recovering well and even has hopes of playing football this season.

Also, TE/DE Bucky Ribbeck has been diagnosed with a form of cancer known as Ewing’s Sarcoma and had surgery related to that on Monday. Doctors were to remove a portion of bone from his arm in an effort to contain the disease and prevent further spreading. He has already been receiving chemotherapy treatments as well.

Here’s an interesting sidebar to the story. Doctors had originally advised Ribbeck and his family that they were going to do the surgery this Friday, August 28, but Bucky and his parents said that they wouldn’t schedule it for that date because that was the St. Thomas game date! So the doctors figured out a way to re-schedule it for the preceding Monday.

Though his physicians have firmly maintained that there is a 3-5 day hospital stay associated with the recovery from the surgery, Counter says that Ribbeck, who will be one of the Strake co-captains this season, is determined to be on the sideline for the game on Friday night.

If that happens, you have to think that Strake will definitely receive an emotional boost from it.

Beyond the obvious health concerns, Ribbeck’s absence as a defender will be felt. The Crusaders will likely start just two seniors on defense, with a good likelihood that one or two sophomores will be among the starting 11 on that side of the ball. Counter says he can’t recall ever being that young on defense with any other team he’s had. Because of that, the pre-district schedule—St. Thomas, Clear Lake and Clear Brook—will be crucial to building the experience level of that unit.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town…

St. Thomas gets ready to begin the second season of the Donald Hollas era. Season One didn’t go quite according to script.

The 2008 Eagles finished the season 2-6 and were winless in TAPPS District 3-Division I play. But they were adversely affected (like most of the teams in the greater Houston area) by Hurricane Ike. Not only did they lose a pair of games that might have been wins, they lost a lot of practice reps in September, which were critical for a young team trying to learn a new system. While they showed some glimpses of potential, they just never could get off the ground.

This season, the team has the benefit of a full season in Coach Hollas’ system, but they will also be a team looking for some on-field leadership. Gone is Conor Mills, who stepped in at QB last season and filled the spot admirably. Gone are others like John Reed, Nick Larrow, Armando Rocha, Kyle Rynd and others who were key contributors in Hollas’ first season.

Brett Mills has seen the Eagles in their pre-season workouts and scrimmages and reports that the comfort level in the offensive scheme appears to be good. They, too, will have a battle at QB, and we expect to see both senior Scooter Fisch and sophomore Hunter Kopycinski take some snaps on Friday night.

Returning starters Byron Henry and Connor Biggio will give those QBs some experienced receivers to throw to. St. Thomas will run the spread offense, so we’ll watch how they’re able to move the ball as one of the measuring sticks of their progress.

In 2008, the Eagle defense also experienced some rough times, especially in district games against St. Pius and Bishop Kelly, and they will hope to make some positive strides this year.

They will again play Pius and Kelly twice (home-and-home) for their four district contests. That leaves six pre-district tune-ups: Strake, Vidor, Magnolia West, Santa Fe, Del Valle and St. John. If Coach Hollas could finish his second season with a .500 record, you’d have to think that would be a major step forward for the Eagle program.

St. Thomas has the added motivation of trying to end a losing streak to Strake. The Crusaders have defeated the Eagles 11 consecutive years, the last St. Thomas victory coming in 1996. That means Ron Counter, starting his eleventh season as the head coach at Strake, has never lost to St. Thomas. In recent seasons, it really hasn’t been close. Since 2003, Strake has outscored St. Thomas, 238-39. That’s an average score of 40-7.

Don’t expect that kind of domination this week, though. These teams are likely as evenly matched as they have been in a long, long time.

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We’ve also got a Hurricane-Ike game this week. Hightower Hurricanes and Eisenhower ‘Ike’ Eagles. Get it? (SORRY! I’ve been saving that one for a long time!)

On Saturday, Michael Silvers, Brent Moody and Jerrell Branch begin our second season of Saturday Night Football on the Voice of Texas on KSEV 700-AM. Branch joins the pair that called the Class 5A Division 1 state championship game last December at Reliant Stadium. That game featured the Hightower Hurricanes against the Allen Eagles.

So, that means that the crew will be doing back-to-back Hightower games, as Michael, Brent and Jerrell head out to Thorne Stadium in the Aldine ISD to broadcast the Hurricanes vs. the Eagles. (So what if there’s been eight months in between broadcasts?) And it will be interesting to see if the ‘Canes pick up where they left off in Shane Hallmark’s first season.

Hallmark, who took over the reins of the Hightower program after Gene Johnson left following the 2007 season to assume the head coach/campus coordinator position at Cypress Ranch High School, almost managed to pull off an undefeated first season. Allen held off Hightower for a 21-14 win in the 5A-D1 championship.

Still at a school that has seen success on the football field from its inception, Hallmark already has the highest winning percentage as a head coach in the program’s history (.928, 13-1). Of course, his predecessors—Johnson and Kevin O’Keefe (now at Seven Lakes)—had very good win-loss records too.

And though it’s an abbreviated history, it is short and sweet. Since the school began playing varsity football in 2000, Hightower has won 80 games (ranked 16th in Class 5A for number of wins in this decade) and posted a winning percentage of .721 (80-31, ranked 18th in Class 5A in this decade). That puts them in the company of older stalwarts like North Shore, Katy, Southlake Carroll, Euless Trinity, Austin Westlake, Converse Judson and Spring Westfield, to name just a few.

The Hurricane program has never had a losing season. In 2005, they went 5-5; they defeated the Bush Broncos in their final game that season to attain the .500 mark. That was also the only season in school history that Hightower hasn’t sent a team to the playoffs.

Plain and simple: Hightower has become a Houston-area football powerhouse.

In 2009, the ‘Canes will have to replace some significant contributors. The Hightower 2008 senior class may one day be known as a college all-star team: AJ Highsmith, Darius Johnson, Colton Valencia, Dele Junaid and 28 other lettermen graduated last spring. Still, experts around the area and state feel that the ‘Canes have enough talent returning to be one of the quality teams in 2009.

Eisenhower’s football pedigree is no slouch either. What Hightower has been in the 2000s, Eisenhower was in the 1990s. Their overall record in the final decade of the 20th century was 86-36-3. They made playoff appearances in seven of the 10 seasons.

The Eagles made it to the state semifinal game on four occasions—each time getting bumped from the playoffs by Converse Judson—before they eventually played in the Class 5A Division 1 1999 state championship, which they lost to Midland Lee, 42-21. In 1993—in the land before overtime—the Eagles play the Rockets to a 27-27 tie in the state semi, but Judson advanced on the dreaded penetrations.

Ike has been good for a long time, too. Beginning with the 1992 season, Eisenhower has sent a team to the Class 5A playoffs in 14 of the 17 seasons. In this decade alone, they’ve fielded a playoff team in seven of the nine seasons so far. But, they haven’t made it past the second round since 2002.

Last year Hightower won the first-ever meeting between these two schools 35-21, also on the opening weekend. We should get a nice idea of what kind of teams both these schools have in 2009 from our Saturday night matchup.

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We’ve got even more at the website this week. St Pius and Westbury, both under new head coaches, will square off on Friday night. Over in the Golden Triangle, the Nederland Bulldogs and West Orange-Stark Mustangs will tee it up for what should be a hard-hitting, hotly-contested game. And in Central Texas, the Groesbeck Goats open their season against the Madisonville Mustangs. LSN teams up with Massey Broadcasting to bring you the action there.

We’ve got great football from all over the state this weekend. Whether we see you at the stadium or at the website, Week 0 should be very entertaining!