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Belpre looks to rebound vs. Eastern Friday

BELPRE — A stinging setback last week may have pushed Belpre’s state football playoff hopes back a little bit, but veteran head coach Mike DeVol in his first year at the Golden Eagle helm has already put the 28-21 road loss to Lucasville Valley in the past in preparing for TVC Hocking foe Eastern’s Friday visit to Ralph Holder Stadium for a 7:30 p.m. Senior Night game.

The defeat dropped Belpre, now 5-3, from 11th to 13th in OHSAA Division VI, Region 23, five spots behind the current top eight teams with two more regular-season games to see who qualifies for the state playoffs.

“But right now, that’s not the main focus with us,” said DeVol. “Our focus is becoming a better football team every week and whatever comes at the end of the year will come.”

His thoughts on the Valley game began with “we were as good as they were; we probably should have won. We got down to the five-yard line and time ran out; you have to blame that on coaching. We have not got a lot of fundamental things in like a two-minute offense because we’re behind in a lot of things.”

However, DeVol added that “we played much better in the fourth quarter, especially on defense, and it should have been a win, but it wasn’t.

“That’s past history though. What we have to do now is figure out what we did wrong, improve on it this week and just go after this game.”

When DeVol watched Valley (now 3-5) on film, he saw that “they play a lot bigger schools, a lot better schools with Waverly, Portsmouth West, Portsmouth and some of those teams. So I knew they were going to be good.

“Last year, they beat Belpre 48-7, and a lot of those kids were coming back. So I assumed they were going to be good, but the reality was we didn’t play defense as well as we should have. We gave them a couple touchdowns they probably shouldn’t have had, and we made them look much better than they probably really were.

“But those are the things we’re working with at Belpre. We have to continue to get better every week, and we won’t stop. The kids didn’t stop playing. In reality, my kids give 110 percent. Even though we make mistakes, they were still winners when they came off the field just like they walked on the field.”

Eastern, which has now won four straight games to get to .500 on the season at 4-4, is at No. 12 in Division VII, Region 27 as is Waterford, Belpre’s 10th-game opponent that stands at the No. 4 slot with a 6-2 record.

“Eastern is improving; they’re beginning to believe in themselves,” said DeVol. “So it’s going to be a tougher game this week that it might have been three weeks ago.

“And Waterford, certainly one of the better teams in the area, will probably make the playoffs. They’ve got some really good players and they’re well coached.

“So both of these games we have coming up will be good games, but we expect to get better and have our kids playing at 100 percent for both games the next two weeks.”

DeVol noted that Eastern “has a nice running game, their quarterback can throw and if they catch the football, they can get some yards and put points on the board.

“But although we’ve lost a couple of players in the secondary, it’s been good throughout the year with two that have five interceptions” in junior Logan Adams and sophomore Walker Feick, although he may be out for both of the next two games with a foot injury suffered last week, but that was after he picked off a pair of Valley aerials and also recovered a fumble.

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