With more experienced group, Blue Devils look to improve on defense

Aside from injuries, defense — and a lack thereof — can almost solely be blamed for the woes the Walla Walla High School football team faced last season.

The Blue Devils allowed a Mid-Columbia Conference worst 418.9 yards per game (230.7 through the air) and 38.3 points, which ranked sixth. The result was a 3-7 campaign that came in spite of the team being loaded with offensive talent.

But coach Eric Hisaw said he has a fool-proof plan to shore up the defense this year.

“We’re gonna try playing with like 14 kids and see if we can stop some things that way,” Hisaw joked.

The sarcastic, self-deprecating attitude is emblematic of a coach confident in his players’ ability to step up this year, which Hisaw surely is. He pointed out the youth of last year’s defensive unit, because of injuries that seemed to strike almost every key player, as the leading factor in the team’s struggles, and why he only expects things to get better this season.

“We have a lot of experience coming back, which is nice,” Hisaw said. “Obviously you’re missing some key playmakers, but this group trusts one another really well, and they’ve done a great job trying to rectify what’s happened on the defensive side of the ball. They take a lot of pride in that, and it’s been a neat group to watch.”

The Blue Devils graduated second team All-MCC defensive lineman Brennan Barberich (also a running back) and linebacker Carter Davis (also a tight end), but Hisaw feels good about 5-foot-10, 190-pound junior middle linebacker Jahmal Mangarero (up 15 pounds from last year) being a key cog in the team’s much more mature Front 7.

“Our kids in the box, up front, they had the best summer of anybody in the box in the last seven years here, they’ve been great,” he said. “We think we’ll be a lot more physical up front. We’re a lot bigger on both sides of the ball.

“With all due respect to the kids that graduated last year, no, I’m not worried. I expect us to be better than last year. And sure, you might say, ‘Boy, Eric, you’ve sure got a long ways to go. You were terrible last year.’ Well yeah, you’re right. But it wasn’t lack of effort, it was inexperience. ... We lost five starters (to injury) in Week 4 and didn’t get them back. And that’s huge. You play with that and the lack of depth we had, and it was just a cataclysmic avalanche.

“I think we’ll be better on both sides of the ball, I really do. These guys are really close, and they’re playing for one another, not just trying to get theirs. And the football IQ has gotten a lot higher, and that’s huge for us.”

QB BATTLE

Hisaw has a football coaches’ favorite dilemma after the Blue Devils graduated one of the top athletes in school history in last year’s quarterback Mitch Lesmeister — the Herald’s 2017 All-Area Male Athlete of the Year — as two gunslingers seem fit to be QB1 this season.

The candidates are junior Keldan Swant and senior Nick Zehner, and Hisaw said they’ve made it awfully tough to name a starter.

“These two kids are playing at a really high level,” he said. “They both had a great spring, great camp, really good summer, and they’re in a really tough battle to see who our starting quarterback is gonna be.”

The competition likely won’t be resolved in time for Walla Walla’s Sept. 1 opener at home against Lewiston, Hisaw said, and whoever doesn’t start the game will get a series or two in the second quarter.

As far as the guys catching the passes, Hisaw said he expects seniors Mason Knowles and Dalton Thompson to be the team’s biggest threats, but that seven or eight receivers could be getting involved in the aerial attack any given week.

TIES THAT BOND

Walla Walla has been trying to get the most it can out of preseason camp this year, and not just on the practice field.

The Blue Devils will hold their annual Pikes Peak Run on Saturday, and their second team overnighter was last weekend. Aside from the standard fare of games and competitions — dubbed the Football Olympics — the event featured an hour-long, player-led meeting where the team’s leaders aired out their frustrations from last season and set goals for this campaign.

“They kind of have their own creed and code that they’re trying to keep to themselves right now, and it’s neat,” Hisaw said. “There were some arguments, there was some really open honesty, there were some challenging comments about things. We got some things aired out, and I know that brought us closer together.”

This story was originally published August 25, 2017 at 9:41 PM with the headline "With more experienced group, Blue Devils look to improve on defense."