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Vikings’ revamped run game could make difference

Oct 19, 2016 | 7:00 AM

The Senior Vikings season is on the line this Friday.

They’ll travel to Saskatoon for a do-or-die playoff game, taking on a team that beat them 30-7 three weeks ago.

But a lot has changed since then.

“We were still trying to figure out our offence at that point, just our guys in the backfield,” Vikings head coach Mike Humenny said after practice on Tuesday afternoon. “We knew who our quarterback was and who our receivers were, but our run game has been revamped quite a bit.”

The addition of J.T. Lamb, who was out with a wrist injury for the first half of the season, made a big difference in the team’s 36-0 win in week six over Evan Hardy.

Lamb ran for 178 yards on 17 carries, helping his squad finish the season 4-2.

“We let him out of the gates last week, kind of full on and he had a really good week for us,” Humenny said. “So he’s fresh and he’s ready to go. He’s going to be really good for us on Friday.”

Because it’s playoff time, the team will practice every day this week, as opposed to the typical three days a week that was the norm in the regular season.

Monday was a physical day – going over fundamentals – while Tuesday and Wednesday are about specific adjustments in anticipation of playing the Falcons. Thursday is just about polishing things up quickly before the big game the next day.

Some of those adjustments will take place on special teams.

“This will be the same thing for our opponent as well – is we’re putting our best 12 players on the field on special teams just to make sure that we’re just making plays,” Humenny said. “Our primary goal is to ensure that we get the football on our return teams. And on our kickoff and punt teams, we’ve just got to make sure we’re tackling like heck and nullifying any type of return yardage that they have.”

Studying game film also always play a role and this week has been no different.

“We watched the last couple of games of Marion Graham [and] we actually spent a lot of time watching the game that we played against them three weeks ago,” Humenny said. “We learned a lot from that game and we’ll make some adjustments, specifically to how we do things and I think that’s going to benefit us on Friday.”

October football can also get nasty in the right weather conditions, as the JP II Crusaders can attest to – they had to play their season finale in five feet of snow.

That was in Meadow Lake, however, and Sakatoon’s forecast this Friday is expected to be above zero and free of rain.

Still, the Vikings plan to leave early to make sure they get to the field well ahead of time.

“The last two weeks have been really rushed, just because of the weather,” Humenny said. “So this week we just wanted to make sure we had a good, long week of practice, get everything in and just head into that game feeling really comfortable with all the schemes we need to put in.”

The semifinal game on Friday is scheduled for 5:15 p.m. at Saskatoon Minor Football Field.

 

Nathan Kanter is battlefordsNOW’s sports reporter and voice of the Battlefords North Stars. He can be reached at Nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca or tweet him @NathanKanter11