By ALEXANDER SIMONE

Staff writer

Paul Glanzer is in his first year of playing football for Hillsboro but he already wishes he had joined his friends on the field sooner.

“After being with the football team 3½ weeks now, I haven’t been here long but I’m already regretting not joining the football team earlier,” he said. “Within the first week or so I already could tell how close everyone was.”

Outside of football, the Trojans’ five seniors, Glanzer, Autin Rempel, Cole Kaufman, Jared Janzen, and Dillon Boldt, have known each other since kindergarten.

“It feels like a family,” Janzen said.

The other seniors make sure to give Glanzer his share of ribbing for not joining sooner.

“We give him a lot of grief for not playing,” Kaufman said. “The only sport in the fall is football.”

Players this year were separated into smaller groups and rewarded on a points system for how often they held activities as a collective.

“Being as competitive as we were, we were hanging out almost every day or after practices here,” Rempel said.

Boldt especially enjoys making impactful defensive plays. He feels that contributing defensively is the best way to get their offense amped up, too.

“I’d like a big stop on fourth down, a nice sack,” he said. “Our team will bring a lot of energy, especially when it’s the last play of the drive.”

Kaufman also likes the defensive side, but for a different reason.

“You know where you’re going,” he said. “You don’t have to account for the other guy, you just go there. It’s not offense where this guy is going there so I have to block him from going there.”

They need to be careful not to show too much excitement after a big play. Getting too expressive on-field is problematic because players can be penalized for excessive celebration.

“It’s not that we can’t get excited,” Janzen said. “It’s just that we can’t do the crazy dances we want to do.”

One factor that makes the situation easier for everyone — winning — particularly with aspirations like Boldt’s of state title contention. As long as the team strives for those goals then everything else takes a back seat.

“I think we all have personal goals,” Boldt said. “At the same time, we don’t really focus on them as long as we’re winning the game.”