Eleventh championship just one win away for Vale
By Ronald Bond
Special to the Argus Observer
Sunday, November 25, 2007 1:21 AM PST
Cottage Grove - “GO411N07” (Go for eleven in 2007).
Vale head coach Jeff Jacobs came up with the motto before the season started, and it has been what the team has driven for all season long.
“I kind of wanted it to be a secret moto that nobody knew what it meant but us,” Jacobs said.
Now, teams across the state are finding out what the motto stands for first hand.
With Saturday’s 37-6 win over Clatskanie, Vale moves on to the state title game, looking to claim its state record 11th title, and the first for the school since 1993, which the Vikings won in the 2A division.
This is not an uncommon position for the Vikings.
Their upcoming game will be the school’s 14th state title appearance, with Vale going 10-3 in the previous 13.
However, the last time Vale made the title game, it came up short against Nyssa, as the Bulldogs won their first of two straight titles.
The seniors on the 2007 Viking squad were sophomores on that team, and now have reached the promised land once again and are looking for a different outcome than the one in 2005.
“Everybody on this team worked hard to get us here,” senior running back Luke Skerjanec said. “Everybody on this team wants it (the state title).
These seniors want to end off with a win.”
The team has run off ten straight wins to get to this point, with the defense shutting teams down and the offense clicking on all cylinders.
Now, the team is looking to put one more solid effort next Saturday when it takes the field in Hillsboro.
Jacobs said team will go back to basics in practice to get ready for the title game.
“It’s the same thing we’ve been doing since (we played) Burns,” he said. “We’re going to work on tackling. We’re going to work on blocking, throwing, kicking and all the basics. If you have all the basics, and continue to improve in those areas, generally you’ll be successful.We talked about it last February as a group,” Jacobs added. “We talked
about what it was going to take to get where we want to.”
The Vikings have reached that destination, and now stand just one win away from sealing their place in history, and locking up that elusive
11th state title.
