Linton Stockton football commences in 2024 with a tilt versus the most red-hot squad coast-to-coast.
Marion Local hails from the midwest state of Ohio and is riding a nation-best 48-game winning streak.
When it steps between the lines at Roy Williams Field in Linton on Friday, 1,385 days will have elapsed since the small-school powerhouse put fewer points on the board than the squad on the opposite sideline. They are a three-time state reigning champ in the smaller divisions in the Buckeye State.
The Miners know they’ll have to execute X’s & O’s from the jump.
“We have to get out there and do our thing right off the bat,” junior quarterback and linebacker Paul Oliver said. “Can’t have [any] first-game jitters, we have to get them out as soon as we start. Go out there and take it to them because the first test is a very hard test and it’s definitely going to be a great game.”
“We are really excited that we have the opportunity to play them,” senior Jesse Voigtschild said in the second week of preseason practice. “And break the streak is what the plan is right now. We’ve been watching film that’s on YouTube, from last year. I think soon we are getting film from scrimmages from this coming year. We’ve all looked into it on our own. We’re ready to go. We’re hungry.”
Oliver and Voigtschild are coming off solid rushing years where they average nearly 200 yards combined. Oliver compiled 687 yards passing on the year. He had 93 attempts for a 7.3 average per attempt.
The backfield duo surpassed quadruple-digit all-purpose yards.
Stationed in western Ohio, the Flyers are trekking more than 200 miles for the season opener. This matchup sprung up out of the blue and came into focus swiftly.
“We had a Week 1 opening for an extended period of time,” 12-year coach Brian Oliver, who has gone 114-25, said. “We tried to find someone that we could figure out who could play. We struggled, we couldn’t find anybody and then one day late spring, they called us and said they have an opening.”
“Me and a couple of coaches started researching a little bit and seeing the success that they had,” he added. “We realized this could be a really good test for us, definitely early. They wanted to drive four hours to come play us.”
A viable argument can be made that the Miners front-loaded their nine-game slate. The opening two weeks could present the most stout tests of the campaign: Marion and Monrovia.
The Miners, coming off a 10-2 mark, will reveal their mettle early on.
“It’s just an opportunity for us to prove ourselves out there,” junior offensive lineman and linebacker Corey Andrews said. “Show that we can compete with the best no matter where you’re from.”
Junior Cooper Smith, at 6-foot-2, is the Miners’ leading returning receiver with 228 yards on 10 snags and a score. Oliver led the team with three touchdown grabs.
Senior Hank Gennicks led Linton with 42 pancake blocks, according to MaxPreps.com, while Andrews had 20.
On defense, Andrews paced the Miners with 86 stops and junior Russell Goodman had 52 tackles across seven games.
Marion is a heavy favorite in Division VII, the smallest in the Buckeye State. It is fresh off a 16-0 season where it thrashed its semifinal and championship foes by a combined score of 80-0.
“I’m an old offensive lineman, so it’s easy for us to stay humble,” Marion coach Tim Goodwin said. “We just do our thing. We focus on other stuff, and working hard and getting better, being the best that we can be.”
Part of that recipe is Flyers’ using a heavy dose of Goodwin’s former players on his staff in his 26th year at the helm.
In six playoff games last postseason, it allowed a meager seven points. The unit was stifling blanking opponents seven times, including five times in the playoffs.
“We did an Internet search and found out they were state champs in [2016],” Goodwin said. “They had a good tradition, [we researched] through MaxPreps. They were 10-2 last year. We found out how [their players] were. We’re a country school. Our kids are either on the farm or their parents were raised on a farm.
“I would just rather play a country school,” he added. “We only had a couple choices and one was a parochial city school in Ohio that was about the same distance away in Northeast Ohio.”
Goodwin said the team is stocked with nine returning offensive starters, two of which are shifting to the other side of the ball, it has five holdovers.
The offense they will run will have multiple looks, including running a spread look and I formations. Goodwin said the team’s supplied with “unusual speed.”
“We have very high expectations of ourselves and over the years...we’re just striving to be the best team that we can be,” Goodwin said. “We didn’t start out that way. If you kind of just shift your focus on that, you don’t worry about any of the other stuff. It doesn’t matter.”
The Miners, meanwhile, have been a contender in the Class 2A state tourney in recent history. Under the tutelage of Oliver, the team has won a state title, another semistate and four regional plaques.
This opener is a one-off matchup for a pair of squads with big aspirations for 2024.
“Our goal is to win a [state] championship and you have to be able to go out there and take a punch to the mouth and see how we can respond to that,” Brian said.
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