The young Viking football team looks to rebound from a 4-7 record last season, and rebuild on the progress made with second year head coach Danny Sullivan. The team is brimming with a new sense of confidence, generated from their head coach.

“There’s no reason why we can’t win our League,” head coach Sullivan said, “we’re talented enough to get it done, we just need to make sure that we execute and stay attentive to the details.”

The team is a close group of guys that all have a tremendous amount of respect for Sullivan.

“Our team’s chemistry is very good,” quarterback Jackson Chryst (‘19) said, “and Sullivan elevates it by bringing energy when we are down.”

The offense is lead by third year starting senior running back Paul Jackson III, who finished last year with a 1000 yard season.

“Paul Jackson is a special football player,” Sullivan said, “he does things they really can’t coach.”

With Jackson  and Chryst at the offensive helm, along with a young talented core of receivers, the Vikings are hoping to have a balanced offensive approach.

“We have a chance to be extremely balanced, run the ball a lot and still throw it,” Sullivan said.“You have a bunch of guys that can catch the ball and make plays and that’s something that’s going to help Jackson Chryst going forward. So if Paul [Jackson] can break some big runs and we start throwing the ball successfully, it’s going to be tough for teams to stop us.”

One of the major problems the Vikings face this year is lack of depth, so many players are asked to play both ways.

We’re going to have to ask guys to step up and help us out with a roster size of 35 right now we got to make sure that we’re continuously getting better everyday,” Sullivan said.

The Vikings have many upcoming juniors, who were on the 9-1 junior varsity team last year.

“The best part is that the kids coming up experienced success last year, something that hasn’t been apparent here for a while, so when you experience success you build a lot of confidence,” Sullivan said. “ We

’re asking them [the upcoming juniors] to play on Varsity right away and they have no problem, they’ve done really well. We also return 15 stars from last year, so it’s been a big help [and] there’s definitely different a feel to how things want to go to go this year.”

Although the Vikings have high aspirations, the focus will be to take it one step at a time, starting off with the away opener against Patterson on August 25.

“The smallest goal is that we really need to win next week,” Sullivan said,  “I think that if we win on the road two hours away, in a hostile environment, where the whole town shuts down for football, it should propel us forward big time.”