Goodwin: 'We didn't make plays'
(Editor's Note: Center quarterback player Ryan Goodwin has allowed PineyWoodsSports.com to once again go 'inside the huddle' and give fans an up-close-and-personal look at the Roughrider football team in 2010. Goodwin is a senior this season. His column will run twice a week throughout football season.)
We knew going into the game Friday that Linden-Kildare was going to play us as hard as they could and they were going to leave everything out on the field. We also knew we had to do the same if we were going to win. This wasn't going to be a game where we could rely on just our speed to win the game.
Our coaches wanted us to play a team that resembled us in style. Linden-Kildare runs a similar offense to ours and they also rely on speed on defense like we do. We think playing teams like this will help us prepare for later in the year when we might see them in the playoffs, but Friday we didn't play as well as we wanted to.
Coach (Kevin) Goodwin has told us a hundred times that teams don't learn anything from losing, but they do have their eyes opened. That's what we feel like happened Friday. We finally realized that there are other teams that are just as fast, just as athletic and just as talented as we are. Texas - and especially East Texas - is a football state. There isn't a team in this part of the country that doesn't have a least one good athlete that can run and hit.
It took us losing to a team that we feel we are better than to prove that to us. We could have won Friday, but we didn't. We didn't do the things we knew we had to. We didn't put pressure on their quarterback, or come up with big hits on him. We didn't execute on offense and we weren't able to make game changing plays on special teams.
The bottom line is we didn't make plays. We were ahead of them going into the half and when we came back out we didn't take control again. Instead of us making big plays on 3rd-and-long or 4th-and-short, we allowed them to; and it cost us the game.
As a team the loss hurt badly, but a lot of us were in this same position last year when we lost to Nacogdoches. After that game we became closer as a team, because we had been through a real battle together. And you can't go to war with your teammates and not feel closer to them afterward.
We know we have to grow even stronger from this loss and bounce back, like we were able to last year. This week will show us how much heart we have, and if we are willing to get up after being knocked to the 'mat' and fight back. We are going to push ourselves to leave the team we were last Friday in the past and start working on becoming a better one.
Thanks for the support 'Rider fans!