March 28, 2024

After first shutout in years, Colfax-Mingo aiming for another

COLFAX — Following Colfax-Mingo’s season-opening victory at Pleasantville last Friday, the team stopped at a Casey’s General Store on the way home. The players wanted food. They received a history lesson.

The Tigerhawks shut out Pleasantville, 21-0. The coaches, curious, started digging. How long had it been since Colfax-Mingo, a team that allowed an average of roughly 54 points per game last season, last held an opponent scoreless?

“After the game coach (Matt) Barkalow came up to me and said in all the years he had, it had been a long time, so then we started looking into it a little bit and asked a few other people and figured out it was back in ‘03,” second-year head coach Jeff Lietz said. “I didn’t tell the boys that until we got to Casey’s, so they didn’t know that they had done something that hadn’t been done in quite some time.

“It’s something to celebrate coming off of what we did last year defensively when we didn’t stop a whole lot of anything.”

Ten years passed between the team’s last two shutouts. The current Tigerhawks hope it’s not that long before the next one.

An anxious Colfax-Mingo squad hosts Clarke Friday in the Tigerhawks’ home opener at 7 p.m. Another shutout is on players’ minds.

“I think if we get another shutout this week, it’ll really set a tone,” junior linebacker Jake Lietz said. “What we’ve been talking about as a defense this year is having a certain swagger about us that we’re the defense this year and we’re not going to let stuff happen to us.”

Such a mind set was missing last year, Lietz said. He described the defense’s play as “...flat. People weren’t very pumped up.”

It showed on the scoreboard. Eight of Colfax-Mingo’s nine opponents last season posted season-high point totals when they played the Tigerhawks.

“Defense was definitely our Achilles’ heal last year,” fellow junior and linebacker Jacob Buehrer said.

Jeff Lietz sat down for individual meetings with each player after the season ended. Defense was frequently a topic of discussion.

As a result, more emphasis has been placed on stopping opponents from reaching the end zone rather than the Tigerhawks scoring themselves.

“That’s one thing we’re working on more and focusing on more in practice this year is more team defense stuff, spending more time trying to get the defense on the field and work with them, whereas last year, I wouldn’t say we didn’t spend enough time on it, but we focused more on the offensive side of the ball,” Jeff Lietz said. “They’re taking more pride in the defensive side of the ball. In the off-season interviews I did with the boys, they all said, ‘I want to work defense more.’”

Jake Lietz, the head coach’s son, expressed the pride his dad mentioned when he talked about the new defense’s mentality through practice and Week 1. He hopes a new “feeling,” perhaps better described as a fear, is instilled in opponents that he and his defensive teammates are “not the little, baby Colfax-Mingo. We’re the huge, strong Colfax-Mingo.”

The Tigerhawks, in all likelihood, still have tackles to make and opponents to stop before that thought comes to fruition.

The first shut out in 10 years seems like a good starting point, though.

“I think what (the shutout of Pleasantville) does is just, within the system, it lets them know that the system works,” Colfax-Mingo’s head coach said. “It lets them see, OK, it did what we see on film. It did what they tell us it can do. As the boys gain trust and confidence in the system, they’re going to do well.”