Shadow Ridge High football players Dominick Wilson, Matt Barnard, and Robert Jones before the 2015 Season.
Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2015 | 2 a.m.
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First-year Shadow Ridge High football coach Travis Foster doesn’t have any delusions about what it’s going to take to build a program. And even if he did, the Mustangs’ 2015 schedule wouldn’t allow it.
“Our schedule, I think it’s one of the toughest in the valley,” Foster said.
Shadow Ridge, which went 3-7 last season, has road games against three of the Sun’s preseason top six teams — Sept. 4 against Centennial, Sept. 18 at Arbor View and Oct. 9 at Palo Verde — plus a home game Oct. 2 against overall No. 1 Bishop Gorman. Those challenges mean outsiders won’t expect a whole lot out of the Mustangs, although that’s a position they’re both familiar with and have started to own.
“We’re kind of the underdogs every year,” senior linebacker Robert Jones said.
Eventually Foster, a former Arbor View assistant, wants to change that. For now it’s about buying into the process and believing that eventually that path will lead to a new role, something the players have accepted.
“You just take it step by step by step,” Jones said, “and it becomes this huge thing at the end.”
It’s a new system and a new playbook for the Mustangs, who will run a misdirection rushing attack out of the wing and similar to Arbor View’s offense. Foster has been working on implementing it since February while also trying to reinforce the importance of the weight program and working in the offseason.
“There’s no question that we have athletes; it’s a matter of making sure we drill the fundamentals into them,” Foster said.
Senior Dominick Wilson is a threat from multiple positions, including the return game. But what makes him excited about this season is that in Foster’s system there are a lot of features for different skill players, and Wilson expects to share the scoring load with several others.
“It should be fun to see because there are a lot of different things we can do,” Wilson said.
Whatever happens this season, Foster is trying to put in the pieces to build something that can contend whether the schedule breaks the Mustangs’ way or not. About 90 freshmen came out for the team, a number Foster hopes he can maintain to build up Shadow Ridge’s depth.
This won’t be easy, so it’s a good thing that’s not what any of the Mustangs asked for.
“We need to take it game by game and get closer,” Foster said. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”
Taylor Bern can be reached at 948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Taylor on Twitter at twitter.com/taylorbern.
