Clear Fork – For the third time in as many seasons Westside will have a different head coach calling the shots.
Though this time it’s somebody that’s called the shots before as a player.
After a year away from the game, 2014 Kennedy Finalist and Westside graduate Justin Cogar will take the reins in Clear Fork following the resignation of Tyler Dunigon this past offseason.
A former quarterback that led the Renegades to the Class AA semifinals his senior season, Cogar steps in ready to lay a foundation similar to the ones his teams had during his playing days. That’s started with assessing the returning talent and getting as many students involved as possible.
“We’re really excited about what we have,” Westside head coach Justin Cogar said. “We were able to recruit some guys out of the hallways that hadn’t played in a couple of years and they’re back out there. We’ve got a lot of good athletes and some basketball players out there at the skill positions. A lot of the linemen from last year that got a lot of experience, whether it was Covid or whatever – there’s a lot of guys on the offensive line that got to play and those guys are back. They’ve been in the weight room and have gotten better. We’re youthful but we’ve got some game experience so we’re excited about what we have.”
Coming in Cogar anticipates running many of the same concepts that made his teams of the early 2010s successful. Leading that charge will be a veteran player in Ashton Reed who was versatile enough to play center and receiver last season. Cogar anticipates he’ll be a super utility player again as the Renegades break in a new quarterback in sophomore Kaiden Vance.
“We want to coach to our personnel but what I know and what I’m used to are those systems we ran when I was here as a player,” Cogar said. “I think we’ve got the players to do some of those things, maybe not all of it. We’ve got Ashton Reed who will get reps at running back and he’s a good sized kid at 6-foot-4, 240 pounds and he can take the inside runs and those hits. Kaiden Vance will be our quarterback and he’s a sophomore but a super smart guy and a good decision maker. At receiver we’re pretty young but we’ve got a lot of athleticism out there. We can do some vertical passing, we can run inside the tackles but we’re versatile and I like that so far.”
With that system, as well as reintroducing several players to the game comes a learning curve. Many of the players Cogar has convinced to come out have required extra attention as they grasp the nuances of the game.
“That’s been our biggest challenge – teaching fundamentals,” Cogar said. “That’s something you don’t want to do necessarily at this level but you have to. You can’t run a college level offense with guys who haven’t played. So our offense is going to be simple and fast and they’ve done a really good job. We brought them in during the three week period and put in the base of our offense so we’ve hit the ground running since August. We’re really hammering the fundamentals down to the stance and start and things like that, so we’re really working on that.”
With a younger team, the key for the Renegades will be controlling the pace of the game and Cogar believes they can do that however they please. Whether it’s going at turbo speed or draining the clock he wants his team to have as much control as possible to breed confidence.
“We want to control the tempo for sure,” Cogar said. “That might include going no-huddle and running a play every 10 seconds or wanting to control the ball. We want to control that and we’ve worked on both. We go fast in practice and everything we do, we do full speed and that’s the way I like it. It helps our offense is simple to us and hopefully complicated to opponents and that’s how we discuss it as a staff. We do a lot of things with formations and with motions but at the core of it the offense is simple and easy to learn. There’s a lot of one word play calls and packaged plays with options off of it. They’ve picked up well on it so far and we’ve been able to go pretty fast.”
Winning is the ultimate goal for the Renegades, but realizing the program has won just four games in the last three years, Cogar is focused on taking baby steps and improving the team. Laying the foundation for future teams and sustained success is a high priority as is general improvement.
“I don’t want to put a number on it,” Cogar said when asked what constitutes a successful season. “Obviously our goal is to go to the playoffs and that would be a huge success because its been a long time but success to me is based off our improvement from Aug. 1 to the final week. If we steadily improve all year, that will be successful to me and I think the win-loss record will reflect that.”
Westside will host Wyoming East on Friday Aug. 26 in the season opener.
Email: tylerjackson@lootpress.com and follow on Twitter @tjack9
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