MORGAN — The Cedar Mountain Cougars football team will open its season at home Friday with a tough early test of its skills by taking on Mountain Lake Area.

MLA went 5-5 last season and took home a playoff win and return all but a single starter from its team a year ago.

“I think they’re going to be a really seasoned, veteran group,” first-year Cedar Mountain co-head coach Mike Freitag said. “They can pass the ball and run the ball. They’re going to give us a lot to stop. It’s going to be a good test for us.”

The two teams met last year in Week 3, with Cedar Mountain coming away with a 28-22 win and dropping MLA to an 0-3 record. After that, however, MLA went on a run, winning four of their last five regular-season games.

“Their only losses after us were to [Hills-Beaver Creek] and Edgerton,” Freitag said. “They really took off after that game. They’re going to give us a lot, and it’s going to be a tough test right away.”

Cedar Mountain, meanwhile, had its best season in program history as it won the Section 2A, 9-Man Football Championship and competed in the state football tournament for the first time in school history.

Two players that will stress the Cougar defense right away will be quarterback Jake Evers and running back Evan Karschnick.

“Evers, the quarterback, he’s a dual-threat,” Freitag said. “He can run the ball, he can pass the ball. I know for sure he’s a two-year starter. He played very well against us last year. His stats were really good last year, he was a really good player. Karschnick, the running back, he’s a tough runner. Tough kid, runs hard. Those are the two guys that we have to really focus in on.”

When it comes to Cedar Mountain’s approach to the MLA defense, Freitag believes that they will be seeing a lot of two-high safety looks from the Wolverines.

“I feel like, defensively, they’ve all ways been a 3-2 with two high safeties,” Freitag said. “They try to take away the deep, down the field stuff. I’m just hoping that our kids are ready for that and that we can run the ball a bit with some success. I don’t think it’s any big secret, everybody knows that we like to throw the ball. But if we can run the ball a little bit too, especially in the middle of the field, it opens all that up.”

In order to execute on offense, Cedar Mountain will be relying on some returning players to help them find success. Junior quarterback Carson Schiller, who threw for 11 touchdowns and only one interception last season, will be starting the year after taking over halfway through last season. His main target will be senior wideout/running back Blake Steffl, who caught 47 passes for 581 yards and 10 touchdowns last year. A new starter that will help establish the run will be Jackson Guetter, who will be the one to set up the pass with inside runs.

With this being the first game of the season, Freitag and the rest of the Cedar Mountain coaching staff will be getting a good look at all the new pieces that the team has been integrating.

“We’ve got six new starters on defense, we have six new starters on offense, but at the same time we start almost all seniors,” Freitag said. “Our backfield is juniors on offense. We have an offensive backfield of juniors, and our offensive linemen and receivers are seniors. Yeah, we have new players out there, but they’re also kids that have been in our system for a while who have played spot time last year. But really we’re just looking to see, I told the kids we’re going to get better each week. That’s what we’re looking for, is to get better each week. We’re playing really tough opponents, and that’s only going to help us come the end of October.”

When it comes to determining the winner of the game, Freitag said playing a clean, turnover-less game would go a long way in ensuring victory.

“The turnover battle is always a big one,” he said. “Last year we kind of did everything we could to make it hard on ourselves. We fumbled on our first play of the game and they recovered, we had a first and goal at the one-foot line, we couldn’t punch it in, we threw a pick-6. But we found a way to get a win down there last year. This year too if we can just take care of the ball and if we can establish our running game, I think we’ll do fine.”