Hubs show winning never gets old
ROCHELLE -- With a sparkling school next to its state-of-the-art athletic complex, Rochelle is a "new school" in the most literal sense.
Until you see the Hubs play football. Then it's all old school.
New school in football is the West Coast offense. It's spreading the field and playing three or four wide receivers, throwing the ball 30 or 40 (or more) times a game.
Three yards and a cloud of dust? That's a generation -- maybe two -- ago.
Not at Rochelle. The Hubs run the double wing T, and it doesn't get more old school than that.
Rochelle still believes in running the ball to win games. And it's working.
The way things are going, Rochelle might not reach 30 attempts for the season. They came into the game with 7 pass attempts the first three weeks, and after 2 more Friday, stand at 9 through four games.
Batavia coach Mike Gaspari is impressed. Why pass the ball if you can run it like that?
"Last year we felt one of our toughest opponents in terms of trying to defense them --even though they don't throw the football. They don't have to," Gaspari said. "I couldn't be more complimentary of them."
Actually, 3 yards and a cloud of dust slights how effective Rochelle's running game is. The Hubs averaged 7.4 yards a carry against Batavia and finished with 375 of their 384 total yards on the ground.
They ran 51 plays from scrimmage, and 49 were runs. That goes with the joke the die-hard Hubs fans enjoy telling here.
"Rochelle likes to throw the ball about 10 times a night, and 9 of those are in warm-ups."
It's a philosophy that has been wildly successful through the years under coach Kevin Crandall.
"I think because of cycles the prevalent thing now is to spread the ball out," Crandall said. "But we don't know how to do that well. We don't have those kind of kids. We have good, hard-nosed kids that we can develop. It's a lot easier for us to develop offensive lineman and good, hard-nosed running backs than it is to develop fast wide receivers and gifted quarterbacks."
While the football remains old school, everything else at Rochelle's new facility was a modern treat to high school football fans.
This was just the second game at the field, one that drew rave reviews from Batavia fans and coaches alike.
The playing field is almost perfectly flat. They worked for three years on the field before opening it for football last week against Kaneland.
The football field is part of a $3.5 million athletic complex. You can hang out in the Hub Plaza at halftime and get some Hub Grub to satisfy your appetite.
It's a shrine to high school football, one that could be easily confused with Texas if the nearby corn fields could be replaced with oil rigs. The stadium seats 3,500, which means there is room for about 1 of every 4 residents in the town of 12,000 to come cheer on the Hubs.
"It's just tremendous," Crandall said. "I think it's as fine a high school facility as there is in the state. It goes along with the school building that is first class in every way. We are very fortunate."
And Rochelle treats its fans to first class football, now 4-0 on the season. Rochelle is going to make a run at the Western Sun Conference title this year, and you can bet they'll get there on the ground.
"That's the way we play football here, and we start playing it that way in 4th grade and we play it all the way through," Crandall said. "It's just what we know and what we do."