It was a step in the right direction for the St. Mary Marauders, even if the result on the scoreboard wasn’t what they wanted in a 21-13 loss to the North Battleford Comprehensive High School Vikings last Thursday in North Battleford.
Marauder head coach Curt Hundeby says he saw improvement in several areas for St. Mary.
“I feel like we played a lot better than we did the previous week. We cleaned up a lot of mistakes have made, especially offensively and defensively. Special teams, we didn’t we weren’t quite as sharp as we were the previous week, but we certainly made some major strides in the other two areas.”
North Battleford would score the lone touchdown in the first quarter as Isaac Neufeld would find Kade Lehman for a 17-yard touchdown pass to put the Vikings up early.
That would be all the scoring in the first half for either team. St. Mary would even the score in the third quarter with a five-yard run from Cameron Neudorf.
The Vikings would retake the lead later in the third quarter as Neufeld would find Lehman for a second passing touchdown, this time from seven yards out. They would fail to add an extra point or two point conversion.
Levi Koenig would find paydirt for the Vikings to start out the fourth quarter from three yards out to extend the lead to 21-7 after a successful two-point conversion.
St. Mary would add another score from Neudorf, with a three-yard rushing touchdown, but that would be as close as the Marauders would get.
With the Marauders being within a single score for a majority of the evening, Hundeby says it provided a great test for the Marauders playing in a close game.
“We’ve experienced kind of what it’s like to play a full game of football in that sense where every play really does matter coming right down to the wire. We’ve got to turn those full games into victories now. The big thing is to turn the corner and not make some of those silly mistakes or silly penalties that keeps drives alive for them.”
The Marauder defense would hold the Vikings to a total of 302 yards of net offense, with 154 on the ground and 148 in the air.
“Our defense did a really good job. I thought our linebackers played downhill. I thought our DBs for the most part, did a pretty good job of covering. They threw a couple of deep balls that we had guys in the right spot. Their offensive line is a big strong grip guys and we held our own pretty well in the run game. Our guys played a lot a lot better, a lot sharper, a lot more aggressive this week than in the previous. So I’m very happy with the growth.”
The Marauders will travel this coming Thursday to take on the Martensville Royals with a 4 p.m. kickoff.
Hundeby says he thinks the Marauders stack up well with Martensville on paper.
“A big thing is going to be matchups. They’ve got a couple of really strong receivers we’ve got to make sure we take care of. I think we match up pretty well with them on the line of scrimmage, especially our defensive line versus their offensive line.”
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