This is a real tough league with a lot of good football teams. We love being in this league. It's a lot of fun to go to some of these smaller towns where football is very important.

It's been a learning experience for us. Our players learned a lot and we learned a lot as coaches.

He's a great back but I also give a lot of credit to their offensive line. Those guys do a great job of opening up a seam and he does a great job of exploding through it. When he's going north-south, one guy is not going to bring him down.

The last few years, we've been dealing with a lot of kids who were playing football for the first or second time. We spent a lot of time just teaching the basics. So now we can do a lot more. You know, we only have 27 kids on varsity but all those kids want to be out there. They all want to be part of something. This team has a lot of enthusiasm.

Truckee, they just reload every year. With them, it's all about the system. The key with Truckee is that they have a real good youth football system up there. The kids they get have all played football before. Those kids can just step into that program and play.

He also went to the combine this summer, and his sheer size caught some (college) coaches' attention. You can't teach 6-8. He's always been good in the weight room, and I think football will help him in basketball, too.

It's been nice to coach an experienced team. We're so far ahead of where we were last year at this time. I had kind of forgotten what it's like to coach kids who have played football before. Every year we had to pull kids out of the hall to fill out our teams. We had to teach football almost from scratch. This year we haven't had to do that.

Going into these games, our kids feel like they can compete. That's the biggest difference.

If anybody knows how good he is, it's us. It seems like he's gotten 1,000 yards on us the last two years.