NEW ULM — Week Three of the high school football season on the local schedule has one thing in common for the Minnesota Valley Lutheran Chargers, the New Ulm Cathedral Greyhounds and the Eagles of New Ulm High School.

They are all looking for that elusive first win of the season.

Just one of them — the Chargers — play at home this Friday.

MVL hosts unbeaten St. Clair at Johnson Field while New Ulm Cathedral heads to Madison to meet Lac qui Parle Valley.

New Ulm High School gets on the bus to Montgomery to take on the Tri-City United..

All three games kick-off at 7 p.m.

ST. CLAIR (2-0) AT MINNESOTA VALLEY LUTHERAN (0-2) JOHNSON FIELD

When high school football teams prepare for an opponent, most of their concern is about what their coming opponent does.

That is not the case for the Chargers.

“We are more concerned about ourselves,” Chargers’ head coach Jim Buboltz said. “And if we work on us and get better we will be more competitive if we can get things worked out. The big thing is we need to get healthy and do not lose hope and faith in each other and we will be fine.”

Last week, the Chargers fell 34-0 to Lester Prairie/Holy Trinity and were without four starters on their offensive line. MVL has not scored in its first two games.

Buboltz said that because of the injuries, there are a lot of players who will move up the depth chart.

“There are a lot of players who are going to have to be ready to play Friday,” he said. “We have only been playing 13-15 guys so we may have to use some younger guys and get them some snaps. We are going to do our best and try and be competitive this week and by week four we get all of these guys back. For the first time in 11 games we did not have a turnover last week. We had three guys with 10 tackles so we had some positive things go on.”

NEW ULM CATHEDRAL (0-2) AT LAC QUI PARLE VALLEY (1-1) FRIDAY MADISON

The Eagles of Lac qui Parle Valley are coming off a big 48-14 win over Lakeview last Friday,

“They are like last year’s team in they are pretty athletic [they defeated the Greyhounds 37-35 last year] and on offense their biggest threat is that they want to get outside with what they call Jet Motion where the back is coming in motion and he is getting the ball,” coach Denny Lux said. “They want to get you to go outside and then they will dive the ball up the middle when you get anxious and jump outside.”

On offense, Lux said that he is still moving players around this week in practice.

“We are working on our left tackle spot,” he said. “This Friday we are going to start senior Erik Bjorkstrand there and he will be the third left tackle who has played there. We are trying to shore up that position. The other thing we are going to do is bring in senior Elliot Schoo in halfback and let him play the whole game there. We need a little more speed off tackle. The holes have been there.”

Lux said that Josh Seidl and Jayden Hotovec had been running at halfback. Lux knows that even though his team is 0-2, they could just as well be 2-0 after two, one-point losses.

“We are a good football team and we know that,” he said. “This is the third game of the year for us and it is a key game in the sense that we need to keep building confidence and believe in ourselves.”

NEW ULM HIGH SCHOOL (0-2) AT TRI-CITY UNITED (1-1) MONTGOMERY

One of the things that New Ulm High School head football coach Corey Kneeshaw has stressed this week in practice is that his team needs to do a better job of blocking.

“We need to stay on our blocks and move our feet,” he said. “We can’t just hit them once and let them go. We need to do a better job of blocking and keeping our feet going. We have not done that. And we need to be better on special teams — we have not been good there so we have kind of revamped some of our special teams. We have put some different players there. It is kind of the next man up.”

Kneeshaw still feels that his offensive line is a huge concern.

“We can’t do much offensively right now because we can’t sustain any kind of blocks,” Kneeshaw said. “We can’t run the ball and we have not been good at pass blocking. It seems like there is always someone right in Nolan’s [Drill, New Ulm quarterback] face. So we are doing some new things this week. We are shuffling up our offensive line and see if we cam get the right fit there with different personnel. We will see how it works out.”

That puts even more pressure on Drill, who is still in the learning process at quarterback.

“He still has that running back mentality — when things break down he turns into a running back more than looking downfield.”

Kneeshaw said that the Eagles need to make the Titans work a long field for their points.

“This is a winnable game for us but we need to go out and play to our ability,” Kneeshaw said. “We have not done that yet. We have to try and get the first score. Right now we just do not believe in ourselves and we need something to change in order for us to believe.”