Defense holds in first scrimmage

For the first time this season, the Texans will have played someone not wearing the Wimberley school colors.

It is the first scrimmage of the year for the Wimberley Texan football team as they traveled to Davenport High School to scrimmage the up and coming Wolves.

For Head Football Coach Doug Warren, he was satisfied with the team’s effort knowing that they would make some errors but still play hard.

“I was pleased with everything,” Warren said. “From all levels there were a lot of good things that I saw. I knew there were going to be a ton of mistakes, but I like our effort and the way we flew around. I thought we were physical all night long. Their (the Wolves) tempo on the varsity level got to us a little bit, but it’s early in the season. We hadn’t been practicing on that stuff. It’s fine, because it is a good learning experience for us, but overall we are pleased from top to bottom.”

The Code Red defense lived up to their namesake by slowing down the Wolves’ rushing attack and also not allowing the passing game to get huge chunks of yards.

“Just an overall look at it, I’m pretty pleased with the defense,” Warren said. “I thought they flew around, stuffed them (Davenport) in the run game for the majority of the night, and didn’t give any big pass plays. We had some dumb penalties that got us that we need to clean up but other than that I was pretty pleased with them. Just the way we saw them in practice I knew they were ahead of the offense at this time and it showed.”

With the secondary looking to make an impact, the Texans cornerbacks and safeties seemed to make significant improvements in giving the Davenport passing attack fits.

“There are so many things you can work on but I am really pleased,” Warren said. “They disguised some coverages, and (Davenport is) out there with an up-tempo offense, which for many of them is their first time against an offense like that. We didn’t give up the deep ball, which typically you give up during scrimmages, and I like that a lot.”

The battle for the starting quarterback position continued to rage on as both Dane Hennessee and Cody Stoever got equal shares of leading the offense.

“We tried to give both of them different looks,” Warren said. “They both have continued to grow and get better. Their only problem is that they are inexperienced. To me it is just a learning deal for those guys. Both had good moments and both had ugly moments, but they will get better. The thing about those kiddos is they want to learn and want to be better. They come out there and try to execute the offense and lead this team which I’m pleased with. That game experience will continue to show and get better each week.”

One of the strengths of the Texans offense is perhaps the running game.

With three tough running backs in Johnny Ball, Jack Boyle, and Wyatt Franchione, the Texans rushing offense was on point as they scored the Texans lone touchdown in the live scrimmage with Ball’s thirty yard touchdown run.

“I thought we ran the ball really hard especially between the tackles,” Warren said. “I think that is going to be a staple of this team right here. Just some big backs that can go down hill and get after you… I like the run game, because we have three physical backs that compliment each other well. Johnny Ball who is a bruiser, Jack Boyle who has really good vision and you throw in Wyatt Franchione in there so we have three really good backs that we feel confident in.”

As for the wide receivers, the amount of players in the group has led the Texans to rotate many of them out allowing for different variations.

“Receiver wise, there are a ton of kids out there,” Warren said. “There are about nine kids out there, which you are going to see rotate in some spots. We will settle in at different numbers at a time, but we will let that play out. It is a good problem to have.”

Though the offensive line had their share of problems, they did have some bright spots in the passing game.

“First thing offhand we had too many penalties,” Warren said. “Just some dumb stuff we have to clean up. What I did like was that we protected pretty well in our pass pro. I thought our quarterbacks were under a huge amount of pressure all night.”

But as all scrimmages go, the focus is not about beating the other team but rather working on plays and spots the team needs improvement on.

“When you go into scrimmages, you have things you want to work on so it’s not necessary about gameplaning to beat these guys,” Warren said. “But more like getting your run game going for example. I thought we could line up and run over their defense and keep pounding the ball but that is not what we want to do in a scrimmage. We saw some things we liked so we backed away from them so we could work on some things that we were not good at.”

Wimberley returns home Thursday night for the final scrimmage of the year against La Vernia.