Salamanca football's new generation 'excited' to begin Section 6 title defense
By SPENCER BATES, Sports Editor
After having one of the most successful seasons in the history of the program, coach Chad Bartoszek and his Salamanca football team are chomping at the bit to get this year’s campaign underway.
Last season, the Warriors claimed the title of Section 6 Class C champions, swiped a Far-West Regional victory in the dying moments of the game and reached the New York State Public High School Athletic Association Semifinal — a feat that hadn’t been achieved in over two decades.
With all the success the team had last year, there has been a palpable sense of excitement around this upcoming Salamanca football season ever since last year’s end according to Bartoszek, the 2023 Big 30 Football Coach of the Year.
“You come off a season like that, you’re always pretty excited,” Bartoszek said. “The strange part is just how present it still feels in our brains. You know, it was a special year for a lot of reasons, and just being back out here, it just feels like it went by very quickly. The exciting part is that it is different now. All the coaches, all the different personalities, we gotta mesh it all up again. We got to recreate success in a new likeness here, and that’s fun for us.”
However, it won’t be a completely new side for the Warriors. They return some key pieces in the form of three-year quarterback Maddox Issac, running back Zach Trietley, wide receiver Cory Holleran and lineman Warrick Kyler, to name a few.
Bartoszek noted that the bar is set very high now in terms of expectations and it will be up to these players, among others, to see that standard upheld. A healthy dose of pressure that he has praised his team for handling well thus far.
“We’ve got enough of the guys coming back, returning starters, returning contributors that our expectations are still high,” Bartoszek said. “I think going into last year, we were pretty excited, but we hadn’t gotten over that hump. They really had a special season that raised the bar and … that’s where our expectations are again: to host a home playoff game and to challenge for the league. It just seems each year that you raise the bar a little bit, it adds a little extra pressure, and kids are handling it well.”
NOW, THAT bar has to be put into a new perspective with the achievements of last year’s team. In years past, the Warriors’ goal was to get to Highmark Stadium just for the chance to compete for the Section 6 title. Now that they’ve done that and more, the indicator for success changes.
Perhaps just as important according to Bartoszek, is that the players this season don’t become overly obsessed with the need to be perfect in every second of every day. While he still wants that hunger to drive them, they will need to stay true to themselves if they want to succeed as well.
“On one hand, you want them to expect to win, you want them to be confident,” Bartoszek said. “In our job, as coaches, we understand it’s not going to be the same. It’s going to be different. And you can’t have all your players relying on every play to be successful every time. You’re going to drive yourself crazy. We’re going to fail, we’re going to have some bad plays, have some rough games, you know, just like we did last year. But, we got hot at the right time (last season), and with this group, especially some of our returning guys, they’ve done so much work this summer that they’re ready to go.”
That point becomes all the more important when you consider the players who will no longer be there for Salamanca. Jaxson Ross, Lucus Brown, Carmine Hoag, JT Auman and Keegan Hardy are just some of the players that have left a vacancy in the Warriors’ starting lineup. Now Bartoszek is stressing the importance of those who may have been role players last season, stepping up and into bigger, more prominent roles.
“There are positions where some of those sophomores, rising juniors, or even a few seniors, are going to be stepping up into a leadership role, a starting role,” Bartoszek said. “That was a huge part of last year. Across the board, we were well-staffed in terms of personality, leadership and skill. This year, there’s holes to fill in those areas.”
AND WITH new leaders, comes new ways of leading. According to Bartoszek, a crucial dynamic when it comes to leadership on the roster will be originality. While emulating the things that worked well last year is not wrong in and of itself, leading as an individual as opposed to trying to replicate the exact recipe that last year’s seniors followed is pivotal for growth.
“That is an interesting part of this whole dynamic, and we’re seeing it already,” Bartoszek said. “These guys, they’re a different group, and in good ways. We’d love to have a season like last year. The likelihood that everything’s going to go the same is zero. We’re going to win games differently. We’re going to lose games differently. We’ve got to find ourselves, and a lot of that is going to come in the next three weeks. I think we’re going to be ahead of the game just because we do have our top-end guys returning.”
And as for concrete goals for the team this year, Bartoszek noted how he has come to view set-in-stone expectations as pointless over the years. Instead of worrying about what his team will look like come the end of the season, he has more of a focus on the present. To put it simply: it doesn’t matter how they got there, but that they did.
“As I get older and more experienced, I’ve begun to realize that focusing on the small things will lead to the big things. I used to really stress more about how we’re going to end up. … After you’ve coached for long enough, you realize none of it really matters much. Even last year, we had some games that were very close. We got our butts kicked in a couple games, and they helped us. … So, goal-wise, not only is it for us to put on a successful football product, because that’s what this community deserves, and that’s what these kids deserve, but it’s to have fun doing it. It’s to play a great, exciting, tough, physical brand of football to represent who we are. And we can do that, win or lose.”
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