Hoover Vikings ready to strap it on Friday

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Chris Beaven, Canton Repository

NORTH CANTON Enough with two-a-days. It's game week, and Hoover High School football coach Don Hertler is ready for Friday night at North Canton Memorial Stadium.

"It's just nice to have game week finally," Hertler said. "It's nice to have two-a-days over with and to start putting all the work together the kids have put in, and put it all together Friday night and see where we're at."

Hoover hosts Washington (D.C.) Dunbar in a 7:30 game Friday.

Both teams are coming off good seasons which produced league titles.

Dunbar, which makes the seven-hour trip to Stark County, returns its quarterback and a couple of players with Division I college futures.

"It's a tough opener," Hertler said. "They definitely have the coaching and the players to beat you if you don't play extremely well. And with our guys, we don't know what we're going to get. It's going to be interesting to see once we get under the lights, what will we do?"

After reaching the regional finals, Hoover has questions because of heavy graduation losses. Returning star tailback Erick Howard also briefly moved out of state and missed part of camp before returning home last week.

That means the Vikings are far from a finished product. Basics, such as tackling, still need work.

"We'll play a lot of kids Friday," Hertler said. "We'll be evaluating here for the first three or four weeks to find the best guys and where they'll be successful. ... But we made good improvement from our first scrimmage to our second one. We need to make that same improvement this week or we could be in for a very tough night. If we make improvement and play with heart, then we have a good chance of doing all right."

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