Warrior quarterback Lars Olofson hands off to Keyron Scott in pre-season scrimmage held Friday night in Bakersfield at South High. Photo by the Tehachapi News.
Posted by John Nelson, The Tehachapi News, on August 22, 2015 Warriors Prepping For Football Opener at Foothill
Tehachapi’s Warriors open their football season on Friday night, Aug. 28 at Foothill High School with a little advantage under their belts.
The Warriors participated in a three-way scrimmage against Taft and South high schools at South High the previous Friday night, Aug. 21, and got their first taste of game-type action. “This really helps us get up to game speed,” senior quarterback Lars Olofson said. “You can practice all you want, but you can’t match the speed of a real game.”
Olofson found that out the hard way against the South varsity squad on his first pass attempt, an incompletion down the right sideline. The second he let it fly, his keister met the turf. “We need to work on our discipline,” the quarterback said. “Right now, it’s not close to what it should be.”
On his next pass attempt, a similar rollout to the right, he was successful. He also mixed in a modestly successful keeper to the left and a decent gain by running back Keyron Scott to the same side. “It felt good,” Olofson said on the sideline after the Warriors’ first offensive set, still gulping for air. “It felt like football.”
While the Warriors return many players from a defensive squad that was their strength last season, the offense has seen a lot of change. Olofson played in just six games last year, throwing sparingly, and his backfield will be similarly new.
During the summer, Olofson said, he’d worked a lot on his passing game to try to add that other dimension to the Warriors’ Wing-T offense. “I feel like it’s getting better,” he said.
The Warriors will find out against Foothill, a team they beat 42-12 in their opener last season. Much like Tehachapi, the Trojans had to replace their leading passer from last season as well as a 1,000-yard rusher. The Warriors also had to replace their placekicker, Abraham Katona, a native of Hungary who made 32 of 33 extra point attempts and kicked four field goals for a total of 44 points last season. So far, it looks like they’ve settled on another foreign-born kicker, Oscar Lins, a Swedish exchange student with a soccer background. It looks like he’ll at least do some of the kicking.
The Warriors had a record of 6-5 last season, 3-2 in the South Yosemite League, good for a three-way tie for second. They’ll play their 2015 home opener on Friday night, Sept. 4 against Burroughs, then begin their second season in the SYL on Oct. 9 at Independence. Despite the changes and the uncertainty on offense, their goal remains the same. “We still have high hopes for winning league. We want to win the championship,”Olofson said. And do well in CIF postseason, too?
“Exactly.”
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