The varsity football coaching staff at Indian River High School followed conventional wisdom in preparing for their 2007 season: Don’t try to jam a square peg into a round hole; and make the most of what you have, even if it means breaking the mold of past successes.
Coastal Point • JOHN DENNY
Last season Nick Kmetz, far left, proved to be one of the best quarterbacks in the state of Delaware. This year the sky’s the limit as Indian River kicks off the 2007 football season against Cape Henlopen with their new pass-happy offense.
So it follows that, this season, the Indian River varsity football team is breaking the mold of their 5-yards-and-cloud-of-dust power-running game, in favor of a spread passing offense. They’re also ditching the conventional 4-4 defensive front for an innovative hybrid 3-5 or 5-3 front.
Perry Townsend, Josh Gott, Matt Williamson, Bryan Lynch and John Cordeaux have all moved on, and without them, head coach Jim Bunting noted that it would be difficult to be as successful this year as teams have been in the past. So the coaching staff took an inventory of what they had and made the decision to make a change.
“We took a look at our resources we’ve been given this off-season and decided to make a change,” he said. “We aren’t going to be that big, but we’ll have plenty of speed.”
Bunting mentioned that the hard work logged by senior quarterback Nick Kmetz and his receiving corps during the off-season made the decision to change offensive philosophies an easy one.
“We had some boys coming in at 7 a.m. to catch balls [from Kmetz] until quarter to eight, in January. And we figured, if they’re going to put in that much effort, then we ought to give them a shot,” Bunting said.
This year’s offense will run out of the shotgun, to give Kmetz “a little more time and a little more visibility,” according to Bunting, and will routinely send four to five receivers out into patterns on pass plays.
The beauty of this offense is that it will allow the Indian River offense to spread the opposing team’s defense, which in turn will open up the running game and allow it to become more effective.
In the end, no one player — other than Kmetz — will carry a heavy burden.
Bunting has a heap of running backs to carry the ball, in Isaiah Phillips and Cody Cooke, who were holdovers from last year, in addition to freshmen Elijah Foreman and Justin Kraft. Danny Bokinsky, Trevor Abbott, Ryan Trager and Zack Kmetz will return as a good portion of this year’s receiving corps and should improve upon a successful season last year
Nick Kmetz returns for his second season as the Indians’ starting quarterback and is projected to have an even better season than he did last year under the previous system. Last season, Kmetz led the state with a 65 percent completion rate and was second in passing yards (1,185) and passer rating (168.0) to Brandywine’s Jeff Tomasetti and Delmar’s Allan Preston. He also threw for 10 touchdowns and only five interceptions.
“Nick has groomed himself for this for a long time,” Bunting said. “His dad, Paul Kmetz [also co-offensive coordinator], was a quarterback at Bucknell, and he’s had a football in his hands ever since he could walk. And this year it seems like all the stars are lining up. He’s a senior and he has a great supporting cast. But I don’t see a bit of nervousness in him.”
Defensively, the coaching staff wanted to get away from using traditional defensive linemen in favor of smaller, quicker players who could shoot gaps to disrupt an opponent’s running game more effectively.
Bunting and his staff believed that run defense declined last year after losing Lynch and Cordeaux to graduation. Phillip Townsend also went down with a season-ending knee injury in the Lake Forest game, so they stopped trying to make the shoe fit and instead built a defense around what they had.
“After we lost Bryan Lynch and John Cordeaux [to graduation], our Achilles heel had been our defensive tackles. We moved the [Townsend] twins to inside linebacker. But when Phil went down, Perry couldn’t do it all by himself and we were getting beat up inside,” Bunting said. “So, this year, we’ve decided to go with lighter-weight defensive players that can beat bigger guards off the ball.”
This year’s defensive front eight will basically be eight linebackers. They’ll all play from an upright position and will play from one to six yards off the ball. Bunting noted that Foreman and Phillips are penciled in as this year’s starting defensive tackles, with the idea that they’re too athletic and fast for the average lineman to get out and block.
“The Parkside [head] coach complimented us for our defense in the scrimmage we played against them,” Bunting said. “His line — which is big for Bayside standards — complained that they couldn’t get out to their blocks.”
“Athletic ability can go a long, long way,” he added. “It’s just a matter of understanding the reads, and going out and being an athlete.”
Special teams-wise, Indian River should be potent. Soccer standouts Luke Wingate and Sean Lewis will serve as the kicker and punter, respectively.
“We’ve been blessed to have great cooperation with the soccer program,” Bunting said. “Luke will no doubt do as well as Pierson Roenke, Andrew Carey, Timmy Dupont and so on, and Sean can punt the ball out of sight.”
The Indians will look to put it all together when they host star running back Isaiah Briscoe and the rest of the Cape Henlopen Vikings tonight at 7:30 p.m. Originally, the game was scheduled to be played at Cape Henlopen, but it was switched to Indian River to accommodate the ongoing construction of the Vikings’ new football field..