 For the first time in school history, the Letcher County Central Cougars football program is coming off in O and 10 season. The Cougars were very competitive last year in several games. Fatigue and lack of numbers cost Letcher County Central in nearly half their ball games. However, Letcher County Central has a lot of players coming back from last year's ball club, including starting quarterback, Nick Surgent. Well, it's great. You know, summertime is always great. Starting a new season, there's not a whole lot of sports stuff going on right now. So it's all high school football, but it's exciting. You always look forward to the start of a new year, kind of a new team, you know, you kind of rotate it, the new guys up and the young guys up. So it's been exciting. We've had a great off season. I got a lot of work done, a lot stronger. Our numbers are better this year. So, you know, we feel excited, can't wait to get started really, can't wait to start playing games. For the first time since I've been here in my three year term, we have more varsity players, you know, as we've struggled with numbers for a couple years. So you never thought that that was important. I can tell you for sure that having those veteran players makes such a difference. And so I just think that leadership in the locker room and everything you do, it's just great. I think that'll be a real strength of ours. This year we're going to have a lot more depth than what we've had through most of the year. So we're really looking forward to that and having more people to come in. So we're not really as tired during the games. So that'll help a lot. Well, this off season we really, we put in a lot of work in the passing game and we come out like every day after school and after the summer was over and during the summer we worked on, we worked a lot harder than we have previous seasons. Well, it meant a lot for us to come out with the big season and it just make this program like a top program. Everyone within the program has been working very hard in the off season. And they feel like that they have made strides heading into 2018. I think we'll be pretty good this year. Definitely make progress from last year. So looking forward to it. You know, varsity football is intense. It's high-paced. You know, you get after each other. You know, you take it game by game. You know, a successful season for me is really more about what you do off the field and how you develop our players as men. And, you know, that's what's really important. And so that's, you know, I don't define our success by wins and losses. We want to win games though. And that's part of it. And learning how to win is part of, you know, character development as well. Going through difficult times and being able to come out and be successful. So, you know, we want to compete every game. We don't have an easy game. You know, we open with Knox and we finish with Floyd Central and everybody in between is a good team. So we don't have any easy games. And so, you know, you can't go around counting wins. We're going to hopefully get ready to play each week. Hopefully stay healthy this year. Something we struggled with last year. We had a lot of injuries. And so hopefully we stay healthy. Compete every Friday and then at the end of the season we'll see what we're at.