The #2 (1A) Grundy Center football team will play a distant, but familiar opponent to close non-district play Friday when it travels to Pella Christian. The Spartans won home games in both the regular season and second round of the playoffs against the Eagles last season.
At 2-0, the Spartans have continued to show dominance throughout the early portion of the season, highlighted by a perfect 18/18 performance by quarterback Judd Jirovsky in last week’s 43-7 win at Aplington-Parkersburg. However, Coach Travis Zajac says there’s still growth to be gained from experience, particularly in the trenches.
“There’s still some things that I’m seeing with our line play, offensive line, defensive line, that we need to clean up,” Zajac says. “But again, I chalk a lot of that up to lack of experience for a lot of those kids. And most of them, they have two varsity starts under their belt. So we gotta continue to get better at some of our basic stuff there. And then we had a really sloppy end of the first half with the ball on the ground twice. I think we had a good opportunity to score a couple more times there at the end of the first half, and we kind of let those things slip away. There’s always things that you can capture and coach on.”
Pella Christian, a traditionally strong program, is off to an 0-2 start, with blowout losses to Des Moines Christian and #4 (2A) PCM. In their two games, they’ve been outscored 115-7. A run-heavy team is averaging only 1.5 yards per carry.
The game will begin at 7:00 p.m.
