Tigers finally get to play a home game

IRON—It’s Four weeks into the season and the Cherry High School football team hasn’t done one thing—play at home.

The Tigers were supposed to play at home on Sept. 13, against Bigfork, but the Huskies had to forfeit the game.

Cherry will finally get the chance to play at home today when they host Littlefork-Big Falls, beginning at 7 p.m. at Tom Koskela Memorial Field

It’s not that the Tigers needed that home cooking because they put up 141 points, and the defense only allowed eight points.

But now, the Cherry faithful will finally get to see their team in action.

“This has been weird, but the kids are fired up,” Cherry coach Nick Stevenson said. “The community is excited, and it’s supposed to be nice out. That makes it even better.”

What will they see from their team?

“We’ll probably keep passing the ball a lot,” Stevenson said. “My pan throughout the year was to let Sunny (quarterback Noah Sundqust) swing it a little bit. He had a nice game against Cook County, but we still have to mix in the run a little bit.

“We want to be as balanced as possible. We have to keep working on this stuff. These are all tune-up games, even though they all matter, to get us ready for playoffs.”

Offensively, Cherry will give the Vikings some problems because the Tigers are a hard team to put a game plan together.

“That’s the whole goal of any coach,” Stevenson said. “We make it hard to game plan against us. A lot of people haven’t seen us play yet. Defenses have to keep certain guys in the box to stop the run game.

“We think we’re going to do man defense on coverages. We’ll spread everybody out. We should be ready to go, and feel comfortable with it. We have an explosive offense.”

That’s because Cherry has so many weapons on offense, and they enjoy the wide-open offense.

“They like it,” Stevenson said. “I enjoy watching it. They run it well. If there is a mistake on a certain play, it doesn’t look pretty, but when we run it well, it looks great. We’re getting guys open in space, and they have fun with it.”

As far as Littlefork-Big Falls offense goes, the Vikings will try to use as much misdirection as they can.

“They like to have a rugby scrum,” Stevenson said. “That’s the best way I can describe it. They like to be super tight and compact and use misdirection. They have tight formations, and they push the pile.

“I wouldn’t say they’re any bigger than we are, but historically use a lot of dives and quick counters. We’ve played them quite a bit over the last several years, so we’ll be ready for it.”