Demolition of Woodland Park wraps up an up and down year

The team making adjustments at half time.

The team making adjustments at half time.

Christian Abbatiello, Ranger Review Reporter

The Lewis-Palmer varsity football team finished their season 6-4, after beating Woodland Park by a score of 49-7. The Rangers barely missed the playoffs this year but still had a winning season.

As the only football player on the Ranger Review staff, I experienced this whole football season firsthand. I was there for every varsity game, every, touchdown, every interception. Overall we did have a good year.

Football was in full swing before the summer even began. Instead of relaxing on the couch, we were in the weight room the whole summer, getting in shape. It was tough, and Coach Tupper worked us hard, but we put effort in to football to get results out of it.

The season started with a very satisfying dismemberment of Sand Creek, a relatively good team. We felt good after that win and the season was looking up. But the next few weeks would be tough for us.

We lost our next three games, and sitting at 1-3, a lot of us were demoralized. It’s hard not to be after losing games like those, especially since they were close and we could have won each of them. We felt like an underachieving team.

After beating up on a bad Harrison team, we hit a low point in our loss to Discovery Canyon. We really felt like we could have beaten the surprising Thunder in what ended up as a shootout that we simply didn’t win. Turnovers had plagued the team the whole season, and this loss was a tough one to endure.

Sitting at 2-4, we knew we did not have a shot to make the playoffs if we didn’t manage to win out and beat all four teams ahead of us. They seemed like easy wins, with us facing Coronado, Watson, Mitchell, and Woodland Park. But the way the season had been going so far, we really had to keep it together and stay sharp to win the last four games.

We won each of them in convincing fashion, putting an exclamation point on our season in Woodland Park. There was a slim chance that we could have made the playoffs, but we narrowly missed due to a complicated power points system that kept us out.

Despite this, the season was a winning season and the last four games went very well. We played hard to get our record, and are looking forward to improving next year.

Before this school year is over, the football team will be back at it, on the field and in the weight room. If we want to have a better season next year, it will take a lot of hard work. We are a tough team that showed that we can play this year, despite some early adversity. Lewis-Palmer football is over, sadly, but we had a good year that we can hang our hat on.