There were a lot of people at Kinsmen Century Field this past Saturday. I guess with the end of the summer pretty much here, it shouldn't be too surprising to anyone.
If there is one thing that is surprising, it's that high school football officially gets going before high school classes do.
Over the past week, Roby Sharpe, Shawn Redmond, Darcy Zaharia and a couple others got out on the field with the students that were still in town at that point and they started practicing for this weekend's home opener.
The senior team opened their exhibition season on Friday. While, the PeeWee Gridders played their first home game and the junior YRHS team played its first home game on Saturday.
Not a single student had been to class yet. That's because they hadn't started as of last weekend, but things are looking pretty interesting to this point even with short benches.
The individuals that make up the Yorkton Regional High School Raider coaching staff aren't worried about anything yet. All believe their rosters will get a boost this week when those students who may have been away on summer holidays return to Yorkton for classes.
When the senior Raiders start their regular season this week, coaches are hoping to have a few more bodies readily available, both the seniors and the juniors.
With high school being one of the more interesting levels of football, both of YRHS's programs are in for a bit of a makeover.
The senior team for sure, had a handful of students from last year's squad that are nowhere to be found right now.
In fact one of them is in Halifax taking up university studies, so it is a safe bet that he will not be playing Raider football.
His departure makes room at quarterback for another individual, making this the third time in as many seasons that coach Sharpe and co., will look to the arm of another starting quarterback.
On the junior side, they've already got a kid who definitely seems to know exactly what he's doing out there. He's been playing for a few years so he's definitely got the basics covered. And he seems to have more confidence in his own play then McDonald's has cheeseburgers.
He's got some experience and he acts like it too. Like a field general shouting instructions to teammates before the snap of the football. He's straightforward and pretty quotable too, which is good.
But where his value really starts to show is that he's fully able to play on both sides of the line of scrimmage. Supposedly it's not an easy thing to do. Not everyone can do it, not anyone probably wants to do it. But he did it on Saturday and almost made it look easy.
He started the game at the helm of the offence and finished it as safety. In both capacities, he put the ball in the end zone. He brought his team to within half of what their opponents had to that point.
Following the game, he told me that he didn't expect to be able to keep the score close. He said he thought they'd get "crushed."
Mackenzie Shore should be fun to watch this fall.
Coaches Redmond and Wallace said at halftime they needed to win the second half as they were trailing by somewhere around 20 points. They wanted to win the half by scoring more points within that half then Regina did. If the score throughout that second half would be taken as the official final score of the football game, the Yorkton Raiders would have won it.
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