Area Notebook: RCW seniors lead team into playoffs

It’s playoff time for Minnesota football teams and that means a season of hard work that began in mid-August could be over in a flash.
That time, whenever it comes for the Renville County West football team, will be especially difficult. The 2015 Jaguars seniors practiced and played through the years when the Jaguars’ program was barely rescued from extinction and has since been built up into a top-20 team among the 70 state teams that play 9-man ball.
“It was tough to see last year’s seniors leave because they’d always been a part of it,” said sixth-year head coach Ryan Hebrink, whose 6-2 Jags open the Section 2 playoffs against Onamia at 7 p.m. Wednesday in Danube.
“With this year’s class, it’s going to be an even harder thing to swallow,” he said. “They’re good people, they all get along and they’re good people to be around.”
Those attributes were sorely tested in their early junior high years, watching the Jaguars’ varsity go 0-7 in 2010. They were outscored 228-14 in the first four games of that season, and the program forfeited its final three varsity games and played a junior varsity schedule to close out the year.
That was Hebrink’s first season and the roster included just two seniors and five juniors. The coaching staff wasn’t about to risk having developing sophomores, freshmen and eighth-graders out on the field against more mature upperclassmen.
But moving from 11-man ball to 9-man the next season was a logical move, and the current crop of Jaguar upperclassmen became convinced things didn’t have to go the way they were.
“We didn’t know what was going on, but we knew some kids above us didn’t try their hardest all the time,” said senior quarterback Hayden Johnson, who has thrown for 1,105 yards and 13 TDs against just two interceptions and has run for 648 yards and six scores this season. “They had bad attitudes and we knew if we had good attitudes that we could be better.”
The upbeat atmosphere was fostered from the top down, Johnson said, crediting coaches for the slow but steady turnaround.
The Jags were 2-25 between 2011 and 2013 but progress was made. No matter how dire the circumstances each Friday night, positive aspects were found and expounded on.
“There were games where we were way behind by halftime,” Hebrink said. “So we’d say, ‘We lost the first half, we can’t do anything about that, so let’s win the second half.’ Or let’s win the fourth quarter. We looked at every quarter as starting zero-zero. If we can’t win the quarter, let’s win one play. We tried to take any sort of positive out of every game.”
Attitude is just one part of it, however. The staff knew it had talent coming along during all that tough sledding, and coaches had players paying attention to every facet of building a competitive team.
“We talked to them about getting enough sleep, eating right, taking care of their grades,” Hebrink said. “Putting in time in the weight room and in workouts. Buying in. All those little things start to add up.”
“I think all the credit goes to the coaches,” Johnson said. “(Hebrink) changed a lot, the attitude here. Guys got in the weight room and got stronger, better.”
The summer before the 2014 season, the confidence was palpable, Johnson said.
“We had a feel for what would happen,” he said.
The roster numbers were on the rise - the current roster is 30 players, most of whom play regularly - and kids who hadn’t played football previously were joining the team. Outside talents arrived in the district during that time, such as receiver Spencer Mortenson and second-leading rusher Alex Villarreal
The Jaguars put together a 6-4 season in 2014 and won a section playoff game for the first time since 2007.
“You could see there were some good things that could come,” Hebrink said. “Some kids who didn’t play a lot could see that this was fun and wanted to come out and give it a try, and then you get lucky, too, getting guys like Spencer Mortenson and Alex Villarreal moving in. You see some stuff starting to build from the early years.”
This year, the Jags suffered two losses to start, although their opponents were 8-0 Underwood, the state’s top-ranked 9-man team this season, and No. 6-ranked Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley. Johnson was at his sister’s wedding and didn’t play in the Saturday night opener, and the Jags lost by only a score, 30-22, to CGB.
“It was a setback,” Johnson said. “But they’re good teams. We started working better and our offensive line (guards Tanner Read and Sean Grosklags and center Stephen Countryman) has been amazing. That’s been the big reason we got back winning.”
The Jaguars have won six straight games. In addition to Johnson’s solid numbers, Villarreal has carried 82 times for 529 yards and three scores and he has 16 receptions for 196 yards and three touchdowns.
Colin Thompson has made 20 catches for 333 yards and five TDs. Brady Holwerda has 21 receptions for 269 yards and four touchdowns, and Mortenson has 11 catches for 262 yards and a score.
RCW’s depth has been as impressive as the stats: 11 Jaguars have carried the ball and six have made receptions. On defense, 24 have played and 13 are in double-digits in tackles.
As such, the future looks bright beyond this season, despite losing the pioneers of the program’s revival. Johnson said the numbers of juniors on this year’s team is triple what they’ve had in the past. The parents and community also have bought in at the foundation level, Hebrink said, and he closely watches other perennially successful teams in the area, such as BOLD and Dawson-Boyd, and tries to bring fit their philosophies and methods to the Jags.
“If you get everybody to be a part of it, it can go a long way,” he said.
But it’s hard to stray too far from the young men that have been standing next to him on the sidelines, through thick and thin, when considering the whys and hows of RCW’s football renaissance, Hebrink said.
“By far, the No. 1 thing is the kids being able to stick with it and believe that they could get to this point,” he said. “When they were in eighth, ninth grade, they saw a lot of the negative parts of it. They took their bumps. The credit goes to them and to experience this with them, it’s a fun thing to see.”