It’s no secret that Bradford High’s first season in the Allegheny Mountain League didn’t go as planned!
When it was announced that the Owls had joined the AML it was met with mixed responses. Most feared Bradford was too large to be a member of the league. That the Owls would dominate. The final outcome was a dismal 3-6 record with losses in their last five games.
After a 3-1 start, Bradford took a nosedive. The reasons were many, but most prominent were a lack of experience among the linemen and a myriad of injuries that forced young untested players to be put into starting roles.
“We keep replacing young players with even younger ones,” Bradford head coach Jeff Puglio stated on several occasions.
Tuesday night during his weekly interview, Puglio expanded on the Owls AML debut.
“As far as the AML goes, we had to stay healthy and didn’t. We did learn a lot about these teams after playing them week-in and week-out. Most important for us is to close the gap on how physical these teams are.
“We thought we had a pretty good off-season, but apparently it was not as good as it needed to be. Really, we lost some of these games in January and February. You could see on the field that we were inferior physically, especially in the South where we got pushed around. We have to fix that in the weight room.”
There were not a lot of positives in last Friday’s loss to Curwensville in the final league game, but Puglio came up with accolades for two of his players.
“Alex Daughenbaugh played another great game for us on defense and Kyle Kirk was able to reach and go over 1,000 yards passing. We wanted balance this year and in our run-based offense that’s a pretty special thing. He had some tough games, but hung in there.”
Now the Owls head into their final game Friday night when they host the Warren Dragons (1-8) in a non-league battle at Parkway Field. A strong rivalry has developed between the teams over the past several years.
For each team, this week’s game will be an opportunity to close out the 2016 campaign on a winning note and hopefully set a positive tone for next season.
“We’ve won only three games in the last three years,” Puglio explained. “We matched that this year and we can eclipse it with a win on Friday.
“Warren is rivalry game and they’ve had our number the past couple of years. Practice has been energetic this week with our kids being a lot more vocal. A lot more chattering has been going on and there’s been more competitiveness between the scout team and the first team. They were battling tonight and it was fun to watch. We have to find a way to bottle that up and use it this week [in the game] and carry it over into the off-season.”
Puglio and his staff know what to expect from the Dragons.
“Warren will come after us, so we need to be aggressive. It’s a rivalry so you can throw out the records. The kids have played each other at nearly every level, so this kind of game is fun. They get excited because there’s a little more on the line. We’ve had some tense situations in the past, but we have to keep it clean and just play football.
“We have to come out ready to play, put points on the board and finish the season on a high note,” he emphasized.
