:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/shawmedia/455DLH64JYJUR6QKRYSO6IF66E.jpg)
The Northwest Herald began a tradition in 2009, when Cary-Grove won the Class 6A state championship, of having players from local teams preparing for the title game share their thoughts about the season. Each day until Friday’s Class 4A championship game against Murphysboro, a Richmond-Burton player’s state journal will be printed. Today's journal comes from Fullback-linebacker Dalton Wood.
This year has been filled with great friends, great coaches and memories me and the rest of my football family will remember forever.
When coach Mike Noll came to Richmond-Burton before last year we were all excited because we had heard what a great coach he is. After the first year with a brand new coaching staff we had made it to the semifinals. After losing a tough game we, then as juniors, knew we had to step it up if we wanted to reach our goal this year of making it to the state finals.
We started back in June determined to make a statement this year. After a really good summer camp of lifting weights, run-to-win and a lock-in, we were on our way to Augustana College to end our summer with a three-day football camp. We all, as seniors, came up with the theme of “Finish” for this season. We had this idea because we were up going into the fourth quarter against IC Catholic in last year’s Class 4A semifinal and we didn’t finish out the game.
After Augustana we had about two weeks before school started. The first week of school we didn’t have a game so we had our yearly Maroon and Gold Game where we scrimmage our teammates. That went really well, but we were all ready to finally go against somebody who wasn’t our teammate.
Having a younger brother on the team this year, Brock Wood, I could tell he was a little nervous about Week 1. However, he played an amazing game, coming up with two interseptions. Saturday morning we had running, lifting and film. Later that Saturday we all got together at a teammate’s house and had a cookout and watched some college football.
Being a good team is a big part of our football culture why we have had such great success these past two years. Our first big milestone of the year was beating Marengo, 38-13, a year after they had beaten us on our homecoming. We had been waiting to play them for a year and we capitalized when we got our chance.
Our next milestone for the year was beating Johnsburg for the second time that year and winning conference.
Finally it was playoff time. We all went over to a teammate’s house where we watched who we would be playing in the first round and who we would line up with in the future. After winning in the first and second rounds, we had a rematch with IC Catholic, who had beaten us the previous year in the semifinals. We all had a little bit of extra fire in us that game because we wanted to get revenge on them for knocking us out the previous year. We won 24-14 and we were looking to carry that energy into Coal City.
People had been saying Coal City had the best defense in the state, so we wanted to prove to them that we did, and I think we did that Saturday when we won, 30-0.
We will be approaching this week just like any other week, focusing more on ourselves rather than who we are playing and ultimately trying to win each day.