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Schools

H-H Football Enters 2011 Season More Experienced, Prepared

Plenty has changed from one year ago for the Hatboro-Horsham High School football team. Head coach Gary Pagliaro and his players hope those changes translate on the scoreboard this coming season.

Members of the Hatboro-Horsham football team may be days away from its Aug. 15 opening of preseason camp, but they already feel light years ahead of where they were one year earlier.

That could mean a far different opponent for a group of Suburban One Continental Conference opponents who may not have high expectations for the 2011 Hatters.

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Numbers rarely tell the full story. Hatboro-Horsham won three games all of last season, and it went 0-7 in a loaded Continental Conference, which includes football powers such as North Penn and the trio of Central Bucks schools.

Those numbers don’t factor in the late arrival of head coach Gary Pagliaro, the sizable loss of the previous senior class and an overall lack of experience that often took the field on Friday nights.

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One year later, plenty has changed. Pagliaro, an enthusiastic and positive leader, has had a full offseason to implement both his system and his conditioning schedule. The young players that took their lumps in 2010 won’t be awed by the speed of the game this season.

And, while there will be several seniors from the 2010 team missed, their lasting legacy will play an important role this season.

“The seniors last year had to deal with adversity,” rising senior quarterback Aaron Channing said, referring to both the late coaching hire and the losing season. “They didn’t get down. They brought intensity and hope to every practice, and they always tried to get better. It is our duty to try to pass that down to our underclassmen.”

And that is how a winning foundation is built.

“In late October and November last season, the kids came to practice like we were 10-0,” Pagliaro said. “That’s very impressive. We got better throughout the season, and I thought we played better in some of our losses than we did in our wins.”

The developments of last season carried into winter workouts and through a three-day camp recently at West Chester, when the chemistry that developed on the field may have been trumped only by the chemistry developed off it.

“Take football out of the equation,” Pagliaro said. “The kids were together. They roomed together. They learned a lot about each other. I think the kids loved it. It was a great experience.”

And it was yet another experience they didn’t have last year, since they barely knew their own coach by the start of August.

“We were in survival mode,” Pagliaro said. “We kept a lot of things vanilla. As far as being prepared, we are light years ahead right now.”

Offensively, the Hatters will look for a balanced attack to both put points on the scoreboard and to keep some premier opposing offenses on the bench. Channing was the starting J.V. quarterback last season, and he will see plenty of experience in front of him, including tight end Frank Coluntouno.

As for the defense, there are also reasons for confidence. Key returners up front will help the Hatters at the line of scrimmage, and overall experience throughout the defense will allow the unit to gel far more quickly than it could last season.

With four road games to start the season, which opens Aug. 20 at Upper Perkiomen, the team will need to gel quickly to get off to a solid start. And even if it takes an early lump or two, recent history shows that this is a program that won’t back down.

By the time the conference season opens Sept. 23 with a home game against Central Bucks East, this team believes it will be ready to turn some heads.

“I really think we will be a surprise team this year,” said Coluntouno, who also plays linebacker. “I honestly think we won’t be near the team we were last year. We had a couple close games we could have had. We now understand the speed of the game, and we’ll be bigger, faster and stronger.”

And they are hungry. One win-less season within its own division is one too many, and even in a division as loaded as the Continental, Channing can’t wait to taste victory.

“We look forward to those games,” he said. “We want to try to prove ourselves. We want to play North Penn, the Central Bucks schools and show we belong.”

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