As the Dover High School football team walked off the field for the final time this season Nov. 13, Head Coach Carlton Brown had already started preparing for 2010 in his mind.
The Senators (4-6, 2-4) were coming off a 42-12 shellacking at the hands of cross-town rival Caesar Rodney High School on the road, something Brown said he wanted to quickly forget.
“There’s no excuses,” he said. “They’re good. They’ve got some good players and they play hard, and I wish them luck in the postseason.”
With the win, the No. 5 Riders (7-3, 5-1) move on to the playoffs where they will meet No. 4 Sussex Tech High School (9-1, 5-1). The Senators, on the other hand, begin the nine-month off-season.
Brown said even though his team doesn’t hit the field again until August, preparations need to begin much sooner.
“We bring a lot of guys back but it depends on what we do in the off-season,” he said. “A lot of it starts in the weight room. This season, it wasn’t that we didn’t have the athletic ability, it’s that we weren’t strong enough to compete up front.
“So instead of lifting in June when we normally start because of all the other stuff that goes on in the building, we’re going to start in January.”
Before the Senators’ final game of the season even started, Brown’s team already was behind the eight ball.
Starting junior quarterback Kamal Abrams was unavailable with a concussion, and backup Xavier Allen also was out with an injury.
That left Brown and his staff scrambling to rearrange the playbook and create some strategies on how to defeat the Riders.
The end result was a series of wildcat offense plays that failed to fool the CR defense.
“It’s tough to game plan in a week,” Brown said. “When your starting quarterback is not there, you scramble a lot just trying to figure out ways to do things offensively.”
Freshman Ian Gory filled in at the starting QB role, and by his coach’s account did a fine job, but the hit of losing Abrams was too much to overcome.
“When your quarterback is not there, the team, it takes a little bit out of you,” Brown said. “Your quarterback is your leader, and when you don’t have your leader in there it changes a little bit.”
The Senators showed they were out of it by giving up six first-half touchdowns to the Riders. Pierre Foreman scored a rushing touchdown in the third quarter, followed by a Gory touchdown pass to senior receiver Brandon Arrington in the fourth.
