Big Horn And Tongue River Teams On The Road Again At Wheatland And Torrington

For the second straight week, the high school football fields in Sheridan County will be quiet as all teams are on the road again.

Last week Big Horn got a big break when they forced Torrington to fumble at the 1 in the first quarter.

The Rams would take control for most of the game from there, although the TrailBlazers would score late and recover the onside kick, but the BH defense was able to hold.

Coach Kirk McLaughlin explains the D finds a way to step up, when opponents are knocking on the door.

“The kids, they just get really aggressive at that point and they just got a fire in their gut, they want to make that stop. They don’t like it when teams score on them and they’re doing a good job of being super aggressive and physical on the goal line.”

Now it’s onto Wheatland, who almost beat Torrington 2 weeks ago.

Halfway through the season, the Bulldogs currently have the final playoff spot in the east, and Coach McLaughlin says he hopes back-to-back long road trips doesn’t wear out his players.

“They’re fighting for their playoff hopes too, so they’re trying to get themselves in a good seeding position for the playoffs and they’re going to have a great game ready for us. It’s always a tough place to play. Anytime you have back to back weeks where you travel a long ways like this, you got to be weary, because some teams don’t travel well and we got to make sure that we’re road warriors and that we travel with the intent to go out and play great football on Friday night, because if we don’t, they could get us.”

BH currently has the best passing attack in Class 2A, while Wheatland boasts the best pass defense, but they also have the 2nd worst rush defense.

Meanwhile, Tongue River blocked a punt and ran it back for an early score at Newcastle last week, and they never looked back.

Coach Steve Hanson says the only downside was the Eagles’ offense had to wait longer than normal to get on the field and that may have affected their mind set a little bit.

“We really could not have got off to better start than we did. We like putting our defense out early and letting them set a tempo and offense clicked along and honestly there was a lot of things to coach up on the offensive side. We did not look real clean early, even though we moved the ball well. It was a really good game for us to evaluate and go ‘you know there’s a lot of things we could do better,’ and we’re going to have to do better coming down the stretch here.”

TR heads to Torrington to play a TrailBlazer team that was dominating the 2A East 2-and-3 years ago, but now the 2A East teams have caught up to them.

Coach Hanson says that’s no excuse to underestimate them.

“They are a big physical athletic team and in a lot of ways should have won that Big Horn game. There were multiple plays in that game that they could’ve made that the ball goes a little bit, a game of inches and it goes an inch or 2 the other way, they win that game against a really good Big Horn team, so we got to evaluate the tape on them from Wheatland, to Burns to Big Horn and then come out and play good football.”

Kickoff for both games is scheduled for 6pm.