WHITMIRE — The Whitmire Jr. Chargers capped off their 2019-20 football season, not only going undefeated (9-0), but winning the playoffs.
Coach Daniel Felker, who took over the team three years ago after the 2016 season, said that team went 0-11 and only scored two touchdowns for that first year.
“I’d been coaching some in Whitmire, coached some with the Broncos in Newberry, and then ended up going back to Whitmire. After the 2016 season, we kind of just did a revamp of the whole program, gave it a name — came up with the Chargers,” he said.
The following year, the team went 7-4 and last year they were 7-3.
“So it kind of got better each year for the last three years. This year we scored 292 points so that’s averaging roughly 33 points a game,” Felker said.
On defense, Felker said the team only averaged giving up six points.
“Nobody really thought that somebody could take a team from Whitmire (10-12 year olds) and actually put something like that together. The kids actually wanted it — they have been looking forward to it because we’ve come so close the last two years,” he said.
Felker added that at the start of the season he and the other coaches saw what they had in their players. They also did not know what any of the teams from Newberry looked like.
“We knew we had a decent team, an athletic team, but we didn’t really expect to go 9-0. One game got rained out so we more than likely would have been 10-0,” he said.
For Felker and his team, he said when broken down, preparing his team, he focuses on blocking and tackling.
“If you set up your defense and teach them positions the right way on how to contain from the corners — once you teach it right as far as responsibility, it all still goes back to blocking and tackling. I don’t care if you have the two best running backs in the league. If you can’t block for them you’re not going to win football games, and if you can’t tackle you’re more than likely not going to win either,” he said. “We hold a certain level of perfection that I look for — a lineman’s stance, it takes zero athletic ability to get into a correct stance. If they can do nothing else, the least they can do is get in a stance correctly.”
When looking at their opponents, Felker said the Jets were always a tough team to prepare for.
“That’s probably the team I’ve had the toughest time with over the last three years. Honestly, I was surprised at the lack of size this year because last year the Jets had a lot of big kids,” he said. “This year the Prosperity Panthers had some pretty good size kids, but as far as a lack of size in general, I’m not sure where all the big kids in Newberry went to or if they just opted not to play football.”
With the season complete, Felker will be losing eight out of the 18 players on the team — with 10 returning plus those coming from the Pee Wee team. Like past years, Felker said they will continue to work on blocking and tackling while also learning the basics of football.
He said the main thing is that the kids have fun, while also learning skills such as how to be young men and how to be humble.
“Even though we were undefeated, they weren’t cocky or arrogant about it. They stayed level-headed even though halfway through the season we looked and were kind of like ‘you know what, we could actually make a run at this,’ Felker said. “We really didn’t think we would go undefeated, but we knew we had a shot at it.”