Emporia High’s first-team backfield showed some of what it could do during the team’s annual preseason scrimmage Friday night at Welch Stadium, breaking off a few nice runs against the first-team defense and a 32-yard touchdown against the junior varsity defense.
EHS coach Bill Lowe’s focus afterward, though, was on toughness. He didn’t see enough of it, from either the offense or the defense.
“We’re not very good yet,” he said. “We’re not very physically tough yet, or mentally tough. We’ve gotta get a lot tougher, physically and mentally.”
The scrimmage featured a series of matchups mixing and matching different squads. The freshmen offense took on the third-team defense to start the scrimmage, and later matchups featured the second team offenses and defenses facing each other in a series, as well as the first-team offense facing off against the JV and first-team defenses. After about an hour and a half of scrimmages, the event ended with conditioning jogs and sprints.
One of the highlights was a touchdown that was called back. On the second play of the first-team offense’s face-off against the JV defense, running back Mark Kolmer found his way up the middle, then cut back down the left sideline and raced to the other end for an 86-yard touchdown run — but a penalty brought the play back 32 yards. Corey Bacon got to score the touchdown on the next play, breaking a tackle and finding daylight down the right side until he reached the end zone.
On the next play, quarterback Taylor Euler kept the ball on an option and sped past the secondary for an 80-yard scoring run of his own.
Kicker Brian Dorsey, who joined the team this week, made both of his PAT attempts.
Yards were harder to come by for the Spartan offense against the first-team defense. Euler managed a seven-yard run, and Kolmer added a nine-yard gain. The Spartans got to Euler for two sacks in three plays, totaling 13 negative yards. Linemen Cord Stanley and defensive tackle Christopher Williams combined for one of the sacks.
Kolmer injured his ankle during one series. Lowe said he didn’t want to discuss the injury, other than that it was a sprain.
Asked what positives he saw in the scrimmage, Lowe said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to watch the film. Because you never know until you grade the film, watch each position and really evaluate the kids.
“And we had a lot of kids playing a lot of different spots, and it’s never going to look great. But I just think we can play a lot harder and a lot tougher.”
Had next week’s opening game against Topeka High been on Friday night, Lowe said, the Spartans would have been in trouble.
“But we’ll get better,” he said. “We’ll work hard this week... we’ll get better, and we’ll be ready.”
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