Cadott athletic director James Sekel explained his team’s situation in an email to both coaches and athletic directors for teams left on the Hornets schedule as well as WIAA officials.
“We started the year with 16 varsity players,” Sekel said in the email. “Now we are down to 14 varsity players (five seniors, two juniors, six sophomores, one freshman) on a good night … pending concussion protocol and healing of minor injuries.”
Cadott was scheduled to play its first road game of the season this Friday at Spencer/Columbus. With the situation faced by the Hornets, Cadott coach Perry Myren said his team wouldn’t have enough players for this Friday’s game.
“The more we assessed it, it’s like ‘What are we doing?’ here, putting these (young) kids that have no business being out there (in a varsity game) just so we can play a game on Friday nights,” Myren said.
Sekel also said the team has eight young players with little or no varsity experience and three seniors with very limited varsity experience.
Cadott also had home games against Colby and Altoona and road games at Auburndale, Eau Claire Regis and Osseo-Fairchild scheduled for the rest of the season.
The lack of numbers would force the Hornets to send out numerous younger players to play against other varsity teams, something Sekel and Myren did not want to do.
“We’ve got to make a choice about what’s best for the safety of our kids,” Myren said.
Myren is in his second year as head coach at Cadott and has been trying to turn around what has been a struggling Hornets program in recent years. Cadott has not had a winning season since 2004 and hasn’t made the playoffs since 2005. Since the start of the 2008 season, Cadott has a combined 3-35 record. Two of those three victories came under Myren last season as the Hornets went 2-7.
A large graduating senior class from last year combined with the lower participation numbers led to a smaller Hornets team this year.
The program will continue to seek out junior varsity and freshmen team games to help get those younger players some important early-career action.
“These kids are working their tails off and they deserve more and we’re going to try to give them as much as we can and keep fighting the fight, keep going 100 percent,” Myren said.
The Hornets fell in their season opener to Stanley-Boyd 49-0 on Aug. 24 and lost last week to Fall Creek 49-8.
