“I’m not a quarterback, I never played quarterback too well I just kind of do what I do and it works,” said Ash Grove senior Kyler Reece.
Reece is a linebacker and running back turned quarterback. His junior year he threw for 1345 yards in the Pirate’s 8-3 season, but the stats and winning is not the part that he takes away the most. It’s what he learned from his QB role model…
“Johnny Manziel, man. That’s my idol,” Reece said. “I think kind of the more you look at it like he had fun while he was playing. He had fun while he was playing football. And I think football is fun.”
Rather, it seems the whole team likes to get in on some sort of fun like the nickname nameplates on their practice jerseys.
“We’ve kind of done that for a couple of years,” said Ash Grove head football coach Ryan Long. “We tried a couple of nicknames and everything. It’s fun for the kids and I usually let the seniors pick all the nicknames.”
When it comes to the rhyme or reason behind the names.
“There are a couple of them where they are just odd,” Long said. “As long as they are appropriate, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I don’t want to know.”
If the fun is the trick, it’s working well. Ash Grove is poised for another successful season, this time with a variety of underclassmen and upperclassmen.
“We cannot let anybody scare us,” Reece said. “We’ve got to be the one people are scared of, that’s who we’ve got to be. We’ve got to be ourselves and we can beat anybody. I know we can. It will be a great year I think.”
