Devils dogged by first-game jitters

Those first game jitters.

If the multi-hour bus ride to the Power-Dutton-Brady area wasn’t enough, the first-game jitters were as coach Bart Haflich and his Noxon Red Devils gave up a bunch of points early and dropped their 6-Man football season opener 56-22 Saturday.

Now 0-1 in non-conference action, the Devils play another non-conference game Friday hosting the Tri-Cities Titans (a cooperative between Hobson, Moore and Judith Gap) on the turf of Jenny Lampshire Field at NHS Friday night.

“Power-Dutton-Brady is a good team but mental errors hurt us early on,” Haflich said. “It was 8-8 at one time but they scored on a kickoff return, then on a punt return and it got away from us a little bit.

“We played much better in the second half, moved the ball well,” he added. “The first-game jitters got us a little early on and that was difficult to overcome.”

Haflich has studied up a little bit on Tri-Cities, and expects a challenging test from the Titans, who lost to Shields Valley, yet another solid 6-Man squad, last week.

“They made the playoffs last year and have a lot of players, they are another good team,” Haflich said. “The bottom line is we need to play better, to clean up some of the things we didn’t do so well last week and we should be fine.”

Pointing to the six turnovers the Devils gave up, missed assignments on defense and some “other first game stuff,” Haflich is counting on improvement in all areas from his team this week.

Cade VanVleet scored Noxon’s first touchdown Saturday on a 25-yard run, Nathan Cano passed a seven-yard scoring strike to Treven Monegen for the second TD and Cano ran in for another on a six-yard run.

Derreck Christensen added two-point conversion kicks after the Red Devils’ first two touchdowns.