Area football coaches talk about upcoming season at Alton Quarterback Club meeting

ALTON – Tuesday night was a night for area football coaches to come together and talk about how their teams are looking on the eve of the new season.

Wade DeVries (Roxana), Mike Parmentier (Civic Memorial), Eric Dickerson (Alton), Garry Herron (East Alton-Wood River) and Darrell Angleton (Marquette Catholic) and their staffs got together with the Alton Knights of Columbus Quarterback Club for the club’s annual start-of-season banquet at the Alton K-C Hall to give some insights and thoughts on what their teams are looking like heading into the season that gets underway Friday night.

DeVries comes to the Shells this year after a stint coaching at Oakwood, located in the Champaign-Urbana area, replacing Pat Keith, who took the job at Piasa Southwestern during the off-season. “We’ve got 57 kids out and good lower-level numbers,” DeVries said in his talk. “We have 19 freshmen and 17 sophomores – the kids work really hard. Everybody asks me about what my expectation is and all those things and all I can tell them is ‘I know that the kids at Roxana work really hard’ - they buy in.

“They don’t question what we tell them, they just say ‘yes, coach’. They move on and that’s what we do – I’ve appreciated that from all of them. They’ve done a great job of that.”

From the standpoint of what to expect this season from RHS, who finished 1-8 in 2017, DeVries said “I guess we’re just going to rip the Band-Aid off first,” referring to the Shells’ opening-night game against Keith and the Piasa Birds. “We’ll get that out of the way and after that, it’s really hard to say wins-and-losses wise what there is to expect; I know we’re improving. We’ve got some talent and that we have some kids who can run the ball.”

Parmentier, entering his third year with CM, also finished 1-8 last season and open at home Friday against backyard rival Marquette Catholic. “I know sometimes we have our ups and we have our downs; right now, we’re currently in a downward spiral right now,” Parmentier said. “We were 1-8 last year; the two previous years, we had made the (IHSA) playoffs. We’re kind of young again – it’s going to be a tough go. We started off the season with about 70 kids, which is pretty good for our program.

“I think we have about 30 freshmen and 21-22 sophomores; we’ve got 12 seniors and eight juniors returning. We’ve got some kids coming back; obviously, this year we want to win. We’ve got to start off the first couple of weeks and play some good football (against Marquette and Wood River in the opening two weeks of the season) against some good teams.”

The Eagles will return three returning linemen on the offensive side and four starters on the defensive side of the ball; CM will be meeting Cahokia this season as one of their non-Mississippi Valley Conference games. “We get Cahokia in Week 3 and Triad in Week 4,” Parmentier said. “Obviously, with our first two games, we’ve got great opponents there to get going; Highland made the (IHSA Class 4A) semis last year – they’ve got a lot of guys back; I think the Valley’s going to be good. Ric Johns is back at (Jersey) – he’s going to get those guys playing good football; I know they’ve got some good kids coming back this year as well.

“I think we’re building for the future, but as a coach, we want to win now; we want to do it this year and I know it’s going to be tough for us.”

Alton got to the second round of last year’s IHSA Class 7A playoffs, finishing 6-5 and open against Highland at Public School Stadium Friday. “It’s a great time of year,” Dickerson said. “You look around and every coach is smiling right now, having fun and talking to our assistants. We’re all looking forward to Friday.

“We had a great summer; we had kids showing up in the weight room, seven-on-seven; we went to a team camp this year, which was a great experience for us – we found out who our leaders were, who are going to be leaders, who our players were, who’s going to be players – that was a great time for us.”

As far as 2018 goes, “we went from 0-9 to 6-5 and winning a playoff game,” Dickerson said. “That was great, but that was last year; as a staff and a program, we want to make the playoffs the norm, not the exception; we want to be back there every year.

“We know it’s not going to be easy; everyone faces some tough opponents – every conference here is tough. I don’t think any of us have it easy – it takes a lot of work. The thing we spent this summer on was trying to get our kids not to hang their hats on what was accomplished last year; you’re a new group of seniors – what do you want to be remembered for?”

Herron begins his fourth year at the Oiler helm with two straight postseason appearances under their belts; EAWR went 7-3 last year before bowing out in the first round of the postseason to Carlinville; they’ll open up at home against Breese Central Friday night. “We graduated 12 seniors who accounted for almost 4,000 yards of offense,” Herron said. “Needless to say, we’ve got a lot of work to do, and we lost a lot of experience on defense. We went to Carlinville for four weeks and we saw CM there a couple of times and went to Southwestern with Pat and saw them a couple of times and we were pretty competitive, which is great for us because we’re not a passing team – it’s good for us to compete in those seven-on-sevens.

“We have 11 seniors, 13 juniors, 12 sophomores and 16 freshmen, so that puts us at about 52-53 (players), which is the best we’ve had since I’ve been there; I think my first year, we started with about 36. We’ve built it up the last three years.”

Angleton’s Explorers reached the postseason for the third consecutive year, finishing 8-2 and had to go on the road to Newton, where they were defeated in the first round of the Class 3A playoffs. “We are young this year, for certain,” Angleton said of this year’s Explorers, “but we have a lot of talent. Our junior class has about 85 kids total and only 35 are boys; as you can tell, I’m kind of short of players in my junior class; that’s kind of the challenge this year with the numbers.

“We’re fast; we may not be as big as we usually are, but we’ve got a lot of good speed. We have a strong sophomore class to go along with these guys and we’ve had some freshmen show up, so it’s kind of nice. We’re pretty excited about that.”

Marquette’s schedule is loaded up top, playing CM on opening night and has Breese Mater Dei and Taylorville on it before wrapping up with South Fork in Week 9. “I promise our schedule is always front-end loaded,” Angleton said. “We play CM the first night and we follow with Breese Mater Dei, then we play Nokomis and Wood River, then in Week 6, we play Taylorville.”

Angleton summed up the evening like this: “It’s really exciting to be part of Riverbend football; I get an opportunity to play football with and against all of you and I think it’s an honor. I really appreciate the professionalism we have here in the Riverbend and the support that we get.”

The next QB Club meeting will be held Sept. 25, honoring the Player of the Week recipients for the first part of the season.

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