Sievers focusing on consistency for Valley View

Consistency will be the key for the Poplar Bluff High School Mules football team as they hit the road on a quest to capture their first win of the season.

The Mules are coming off a 34-13 loss against Park Hills Central and will head to Arkansas Friday to face Valley View High School as both teams look to avoid back-to-back losses on a break of the new season.

Head football coach Dave Sievers said the Mules approached practice a lot more focused this week and will walk into the next game with a completely different attitude. He said the gameplan they established wasn’t the issue it was the lack of consistency mixed with careless mistakes, and he wants it corrected quickly.

“Our focus during practice was to work on what we did wrong last week, which was a lot of self-inflicted mistakes,” Sievers said. “We’ve been just trying to clean up a few things we need to fix. We made some changes due to injury and a few little personnel switches, but it’s mostly just normal football stuff. We’re getting for week two, and I hope we have better results for this game.”

Sievers said he felt the team wasn’t as physical on either side of the ball as he would’ve liked and hopes that everyone will be more assertive.

Despite the first week loss, Sievers noticed a few good things the Mules were able to execute and hoped to carry over against Valley View. Defensively, he thought the team held things together at times, but a few bad plays hurt them as the game progressed. As a coach who doesn’t dwell on the past, Sievers is making the proper adjustments before the next snap.

“Everything we do and how we play from this moment moving forward is our consistency,” he said. “We did some good things with throwing the ball around really well, and I thought we ran the ball well, but we just weren’t consistent enough. When you fail to find a rhyme or flow, it’s hard to get back into a game, and we saw the results of that first hand.”

Sievers said one of the big takeaways from the first game was how well junior quarterback Jay Edmundson played, and though he had a rough start, the team flowed well under his leadership.

Edmundson threw 18/34 on 203 yards passing, connected with one touchdown, had 40 yards rushing, and gave up three interceptions for the Mules. “I think he did well despite the turnovers, but those things happen when you’re struggling to find a rhythm,” Sievers said. “Overall, I was happy with the way Jay played, but we’re still trying to figure everything out from a personnel standpoint and how we’re going to make all the pieces fit together. I believe our biggest problem last week was all the mental mistakes we made, which hurt us on both sides of the ball. We must play more discipline, and our trust will again be under Jay.”

This Friday’s matchup will be the second meeting against the Valley View Blazing, as they defeated the Mules 16-2 last season. The Blazers tallied 314 yards, while the Mules only collected 170 yards, and capitalizing on the offense is one of the biggest changes Sievers hopes to see.

Sievers said they still needed to figure things out when the Mules played the Blazers last season. He credited Valley View for being a good team and that they ran into the same problem: they made too many mistakes to fight back. This time around, he wants to see a more balanced game from the Mules and walk away with the win.

“We have to go back this time and be more consistent,” Sievers said. “We’ve watched a lot of film, and we believe we know their gameplan, so hopefully, we can be a step ahead. At the end of the day, it’s all about executing every single time we step on the field. We have to be able to finish, and the big part of that is being successful on first downs, I think that will set the tone for us.”