By TYLER HENRY
Salina Post contributor
After a rough 1-4 start to their 2022 campaign, the Chapman Fighting Irish will look to right the ship in a mad scramble for .500 ahead of a week nine playoff game.
While it would be easy to dismiss Chapman on paper, the Irish have been steadily building throughout a gauntlet of a schedule as their youth get to grips with the speed of the Friday night lights.
“We’ve been playing a lot of younger guys with only five seniors on the team but they’ve started to develop and we feel like we have the right people in the right spots now,” Irish head coach Kurt Webster said. “We gave a lot of opportunities in the first three weeks but now you can start to see who you can really depend on.”
In the last four weeks, Chapman fell to a Clay Center team whose only losses have come at the hands of #1 SES and #5 Wamego, defeated a Marysville team who in turn knocked off Concordia, dropped a game to a resurgent Abilene squad and held the #2 team in Class 3A to zero points after a quarter before eventually falling to Wichita Collegiate.
With the worst of their schedule behind them, the Irish will look within and attempt to shore up their holes before the home stretch of their season begins in earnest this Friday.
“Everything comes down to blocking and tackling and we’ve been pretty inconsistent in both areas,” Webster said. “We have to continue to work on those things and part of it is the muscle memory of doing them 1,000 times.”
As a traditional power-run school, Chapman has had their fair share of success on the ground averaging 5.2 yards per carry as a team, led by Aiden Whitley, who is on pace for a 1,000-yard rushing season.
While the passing game hasn’t looked as sharp as the Irish would like, Coach Webster hopes that week five was an indicator of better things to come as Chapman put up over 100 yards passing for the first time all season against #2 Wichita Collegiate.
“Our quarterback’s decision-making has gotten a lot better and we’re doing a lot better offensively because of that,” he said.
With little room for error, Chapman will need to play their best football in these last three weeks if the Irish have any hope of a winnable draw in week nine, but there is no doubt within the Irish locker room that such a feat can be accomplished.
“We’re very capable of beating every team left on our schedule but we’re just as capable of losing to all of those same teams,” Webster said. We’re very dangerous when we’re firing on all cylinders and if we can get hot at the right time we can still host a playoff game against a district with a lot of our league teams that we would like to see again.”
Chapman will be back in action this Friday when the Irish travel to Wichita Trinty to challenge the 0-5 Knights.
The team will then close out its regular season with a home game against Hesston (3-2) in week seven and a road trip to Clearwater (3-2) in week eight.
For continuing coverage of Chapman football in 2022 stay tuned to the Salina Post.