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Column: GFW football continues to roll, looks to move to 5-0 Friday

After winning five games last season after years of struggling on the football field, the Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop football team has remained unbeaten after four weeks of the 2019 high school football season.

Not only are the Thunderbirds unbeaten, they have also scored at least 53 points per game in their last three outings after scoring 48 in their first game of the year against St. James Area. They topped SJA 48-7 in Week 1, then went on to beat Windom Area 56-6 in Week 2, Norwood-Young America 53-16 in Week 3 and Lake Crystal-Wellcome Memorial 56-12 last Friday.

Now the No. 9-ranked team in Class A, some in the GFW area had to expect to see an improved squad from last year, but this is likely pretty surprising for most.

While Thunderbirds head coach Pat Hentges didn’t quite expect this much success early on, he knew how hard his team worked in practice and expected them to compete every game.

“We knew that we’d be competitive, that’s for sure,” Hentges said. “We don’t go in thinking about winning or anything — certainly we practice to win, we play to win, but we try to focus on what we can do better. … We were trying to put guys in the right spots. We knew that if we did that that we’d be pretty explosive offensively. I’m actually very impressed with what our defense has done over the last six weeks and how we’ve improved. This is the first time in years that GFW’s ran the same defense two years in a row. The kids really trust it and certainly trust Rich [Busse] and the other coaches as they put together some pretty good game plans for us.”

Sure, the teams that the Thunderbirds have ran through so far have a combined 2-14 record, but to be that consistent and put up that many points a game against any team is certainly deserving of credit.

The Thunderbirds don’t have any one specific secret to their dominant wins, either, but they do like to have a balanced rushing attack full of misdirection and counters to go with their tough defense. Last Friday against LCWM, Evan Martin led the GFW ground attack with 208 rushing yards. The week before that against NYA, it was JC Munoz leading the ground game with 101 rushing yards and a pair of touchdowns, while Martin rushed for 94 yards and a touchdown.

Ryan Lavrenz, Dominic Heinrichs and Treay Taylor have also made their share of plays running the ball the past few weeks for the Thunderbirds.

“I have to give a lot of credit to coach [Steve] Hamilton over at Elk River,” Hentges said of GFW’s offense. “He’s the one that when I saw his offense, I knew right away that if I got back into coaching, this is what I wanted to run. I wanted something that would be simple, that would allow our guys to get after the blocks and that would allow a little bit of deception and some counters, and certainly the kids have bought into it and really worked very hard on that as well.”

Last year, the Thunderbirds had a rough start, going 1-4 to open the season. They got hot and picked up four wins in a row after that, though, before falling to Redwood Valley in a second-round playoff matchup. This season, they have a chance to start 5-0.

With the dominant start to the 2019 season, the Thunderbirds are certainly looking like a team that could make a strong playoff push come late October. They’ll take on Martin County West (2-2) next at 7 p.m. Friday in Winthrop and Hentges expects a very physical game.

“They’ve got some talented athletes, very impressed at what they do from a coaching perspective,” Hentges said of MCW. “I expect them to come out ready to play and we need to be ready to play as well. We need to clean up some of our mistakes. It’s a little scary, I suppose, but I don’t feel we’ve played our best game offensively, too inconsistent. Hopefully we can start putting that together as the second half of the season goes on. The kids are real hungry to improve and I’m just real excited for Friday’s game.”

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