These 10 players helped lead Fever back to playoffs

What a difference a year makes.

In 2014, the Tri-Cities Fever had an 8-6 record and missed the Indoor Football League playoffs.

This year, the Fever again finished with an 8-6 record, but the team is in the playoffs, hitting the road Wednesday to Nebraska for the Intense Conference championship against the Danger.

Kickoff is 5 p.m. Friday.

It’s been a roller-coaster season for Fever head coach Adam Shackleford, who has used five quarterbacks and signed a sixth one — Dante Perez — on Tuesday, and gone through eight defensive linemen.

Through it all though, the Fever found just enough to earn the right amount of victories and make the playoffs, in which everyone starts at 0-0.

Yes, it’s been an interesting season, and one that Shackleford said was fun.

So here are the 10 guys the Fever had this year who may have been the most important in getting the team to the playoffs.

These are in no particular order:

Beeson arrived and was so consistent in both his field goal attempts and extra-point kicks, especially the latter.

And although the kickoff team gave up too many returns for touchdowns, Beeson performed well on kickoffs.

He would eventually lose his starting spot to Dominique Blackman and head to Europe, but Box was important at a key time.

The following week, at Bemidji, he was lost for the season with a broken leg.

Pierce also found the end zone 27 times this season, 21 of those coming on rushes and seven on pass receptions. He had the third most all purpose yards this season, and he was returning kickoffs until Shackleford decided he was getting beat up too much.

This story was originally published June 24, 2015 at 7:45 PM with the headline "These 10 players helped lead Fever back to playoffs."