Rochester football preview: Senior-laden Zebras have sense of urgency

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

The Rochester football team will open the season at Southwood at 7 p.m. Friday.

The seniors on the Rochester football team have gone 25-8 during their first three seasons.

They have scored 40 or more points 18 times with their wing-T offense. Defensively, they have recorded nine shutouts.

It could be argued that there have been many more successful Friday nights over the last three years than unsuccessful ones.

However, the seniors have never won the Bell game against Tippecanoe Valley. They have not won a Three Rivers Conference title since 2022, and even then, they had to share it with Valley and Southwood. And the school’s sectional drought dating back to 2000 remains.

This year’s team has 13 seniors. That includes Jabez Yarber, a transfer from Caston; lineman Declan Gard, who is playing for the first time since he was a freshman; and first-time football player Jack Reffett, who had played tennis the previous three years.

The other 10 are more familiar, including wingback-linebacker Brant Beck; quarterback Carson Paulik; linemen Callen Ferverda, Mason Hisey and Matt Crossland; and receiver-safety Zakk Parks.

Their losses to Lafayette Central Catholic and Eastern (Greentown) in the sectional semifinals the last two years have been by a combined total of 10 points.

“The sense of urgency is big right now,” Rochester coach Ron Shaffer said. “We want to win the Bell. We want to win the conference. We want to win sectional. It sucks finishing second. Our kids are hungry and working hard. We don’t really know where anybody else is at. We don’t know how good Valley is. We don’t know how good Eastern is. We think they’re returning quite a bit, so we think they’re going to be pretty decent in our games coming up. Maconaquah returns a good number of players from the years before. … We feel like we should be playing for a conference championship in game nine of the season, and then we’ll uput our eyes towards a sectional.”

Shaffer said the team went three days a week with conditioning and weights, and he called it a “good summer.” 

“I would say the biggest difference this year is we (did) a lot of weight training, but we did speed and agility, we did a lot of work on conditioning, so we ran more this summer than we did in the past, and it started to show already, and our kids seem to be in better shape early in the season,” Shaffer said. “We were able to do some conditioning in this hot weather, and it doesn’t seem to be bothering them that much.”

They also made their annual pilgrimage in June to the Manchester University team camp, which serves as a team bonding exercise, a time to install plays and a time to figure out who might play what positions.

“A lot of install,” Shaffer said. “Reps of running things – the staples of our offense. Changed a little bit in our blocking scheme on some of our plays just slightly and so was able to test that out against some other teams in our scrimmages at camp. But a lot of install and a lot of team bonding. Just the usual things we do at camp.”

Paulik played tight end briefly as a freshman at the varsity level. Now he starts his third season as the quarterback. He will have to do without the graduated wide receiver Drew Bowers, a first-team all-TRC selection last year.

“We’d like to see Carson pick up his secondary reads and third reads a little bit better,” Shaffer said. “And I think it’s starting to come to him now. The impact that Drew Bowers had last year in being able to throw down the field and stretch the defense was huge. Zakk Parks will probably take over that role a little bit, and also, we have Clarence Garrett who’s going to play out there at the split end quite a bit. So two guys that are pretty good speedsters. Zakk might be the fastest guy on the team, and Clarence is right there behind him.”

Beck led the team in rushing with 1,460 yards and 20 touchdowns, but he also was second on the team in receptions with seven. He ran for 100 yards or more eight times, and the Zebras went 7-1 in those games.

“We would like to use him more,” Shaffer said of Beck as a receiver out of the backfield. “And he was a really good target for us in our scrimmages. Carson connected with him quite a bit out of the backfield. I see those two having a good connection, and I think we’ll see more out of Brant in his receiving yards and receptions. He has really good hands, and he works hard at it. Some people might call it a weakness in his game, but it’s more about the amount of times he gets thrown to more than anything. I see him probably having an opportunity to be one of our second leading receivers.”

Other wingbacks include Trenton Meadows, Yarber, Garrett and varsity newcomers Grant Holloway and Alex Chapman.

Kale Shotts, a junior who ran for 764 yards last year, returns at fullback.

On the offensive line, Derek Wortley will get the nod at center for the graduated James Gardner. Wortley got playing time as a freshman on defense on the varsity last year. Gard, who has put on approximately 100 pounds since he last played football in 2022, has stood out at left tackle.

“Right now, it’s looking like Declan Gard is going to fill in at that left tackle position,” Shaffer said. “He’s really taken to it well. Maybe the only sophomore who will start and play significant time early is Derek Wortley. (He’s) going to take over that center position right now. Two solid replacements for what we had last year. We haven’t seen much fall-off from Xavier (Vance) being at left tackle to Declan. And Declan has some attributes that X didn’t have. We’re looking at a big year out of Declan being a first-year guy back since his freshman year.”

Gard and Wortley join returning starters Hisey, Ferverda and Crossland.

Clark and Reffett will figure in at tight end.

Defensively, the team allowed just 11.5 points per game last year, but Shaffer wants to see the pass rush improved. The pass defense gave up big plays in losses to Maconaquah and Eastern last year.

“We concentrated a lot on our pass rush over the summer,” Shaffer said. “We brought in Robert Mathis from the Colts, a future Hall of Famer, a guy that still leads the franchise in sacks. He worked with our guys a couple times a week during the summer. And he came actually on campus here and worked with our older defensive linemen, so the whole d-line. We’ve seen quite an increase in our ability to get to get to the quarterback in our scrimmages. We’ll see if it transfers to games or not.”

Look for Yarber and Parks to man the safety spots. Parks had been an outside linebacker but will move to the secondary this year.

Garrett and Meadows will play cornerback.

“We’re still looking at our mix of linebackers-slash-safeties,” Shaffer added. “Brant Beck is in the mix for either being an inside or as an outside backer. Ethan Bailey, a starter from last year, at the mike (middle linebacker), and then we’re looking at Jack Reffett or Kale Shotts at an inside backer position. We’ve got a little more flexibility, a little more depth to look at because Alex Chapman is knocking right there on the door of getting in the lineup. Mitchell Clark is kind of knocking on the door. They’re still young. Everybody forgets … it seems like they’ve been around, but they’re just going to be sophomores, and they’re giving us good depth in that secondary going into the preseason and starting regular season games.”

Shaffer added that Holloway could get a look at linebacker.

Paulik will return at punter. Camdyn Furnivall and Spencer Backus, both soccer players, are competing for the placekicker spot.

Parks, Meadows and Yarber are among the options at kickoff and punt returner.

Schedule

Rochester drops Manchester and adds Northwestern to the schedule. Rochester has not played Northwestern since a 31-19 loss in the 1997 sectional semifinals.

Aug. 22 – at Southwood, 7 p.m.

Aug. 29 – vs. Tippecanoe Valley, 7 p.m.

Sept. 5 – at Whitko, 7 p.m.

Sept. 12 – vs. Wabash, 7 p.m.

Sept. 19 – vs Lewis Cass, 7 p.m.

Sept. 26 – at Peru, 7 p.m.

Oct. 3 – vs. Northfield, 7 p.m.

Oct. 10 – at Northwestern, 7 p.m.

Oct. 17 – vs. Maconaquah, 7 p.m.

Oct. 24 – Class 2A, Sectional 36 quarterfinal

Class 2A, Sectional 36

Rochester, Alexandria, Blackford, Eastbrook, Eastern (Greentown), Elwood, Tipton, Wabash