COME SEE ‘WILLIE SABAN’ AND THE RANGERS | KC spring game Saturday at 3 p.m.
Kilgore College football players get to take their spring final tomorrow, of sorts.
And you get to see it.
Kilgore College’s annual Blue-White Game is set for 3 p.m. Saturday at R.E. St. John Memorial Stadium in Kilgore, the wrap-up to the Rangers’ spring football practice.
And the Bad Boys on Broadway Street don’t take that wrap-up lightly.
Head coach Willie Gooden (right) said the team has moved in the right direction this spring, even without the incoming freshmen class that’ll hit the locker room this fall.
“It’s been pretty good,” Gooden said. “It’s been about what you would expect, with the defense being a little more productive than the offense at this point. We’ve got some cats.
“From a chemistry standpoint, the offense has came on, and they’ve been complimentary to the defense. We try to do four weeks, about four weeks, and when we hit week three, we were a little banged up. But we’re pretty healthy right now, enough to do a true Blue vs. White game. We hope everybody comes out. It’ll be an awesome environment to see.”
The Rangers will come into the 2024 season not only as the reigning, defending Southwest Junior College Football Conference champions, but also as having made the NJCAA’s final four, the national semifinals. They went 7-1 in the regular season and finished 2023 with a 9-2 record.
They even got a chance to avenge their only regular season loss, with a win over Navarro in the SWJCFC Championship Game, before losing to Iowa Western in the national semifinals.
But that’s the past now – Gooden and his staff know that – and the turnaround, the build for 2024, started months ago.
In fact, it started immediately after they returned from Iowa.
“For us, it’s about the relationships between the coaches and the kids,” Gooden explained. “With the transfer portal in place now (in major college football), everybody has a little taste of what we’ve always had to deal with, with people coming and going. But we’ve dealt with that for a long, long time. We’re used to that. We feel like our young men trust our supervision, and that we’ll help them make the right decision.
“We had about 35, 40 young men to move on (after last season), and that’s coming off of a team of 80. Immediately, we went out and brought in about 20 transfers. So what the crowd will see in the spring game – what they’ll see Saturday – is a good mix. It’s guys they watched play in conference games last fall; it’s guys that were pups that were learning, getting experience; it’s guys that transferred in; and it’s guys that were redshirts. It’s really a good chance to see what we’ll have, of course, without those freshmen we’ll see in August.”
It’s KC’s third official scrimmage, the last one. The Rangers will play one half of football beginning at 3 p.m., and it’ll last about an hour and a half, to two hours. Admission is free.
Gooden said he will not be the head coach, per se, for either the Blue or the White team. He’ll be going back and forth between both.
“I’m gonna let my coaches coach. I’m gonna be like Nick Saban. I may even wear a blue blazer.I’ll be ‘Willie Saban,’” he laughed.