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Football season starts Friday

Posted 8/14/18

After pulling off Falcon football’s best season in years last season with only four months of prep time, head coach Jason Henslin is ready to keep Fountain Hills High School football on the …

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Football season starts Friday

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After pulling off Falcon football’s best season in years last season with only four months of prep time, head coach Jason Henslin is ready to keep Fountain Hills High School football on the rise.

Henslin had never been a head coach of any sport before he took over the role last year. This meant that Henslin felt a lot of the season was spent “learning on the go.”

For the 2018 season, however, Henslin feels that he has his feet under him. He’s also implemented new systems into practices to make everything a little smoother.

“I think the biggest area that having a full year with the team helped us in is being prepared for everything that comes our way,” Henslin said. “This year we had processes in place to make everything smoother. My brother (Jordan Henslin, Defensive Coordinator) and I were able to instill the values of our program: Character, smarts, discipline and toughness. I think this will help our players be more prepared for game action as well.”

One of the big aspects of the game that Henslin had the team focus on during the off season was strength building.

“Over the summer we focused on getting the boys stronger while giving them a program that would stretch them as athletes,” Henslin explained. “For the first time, we were able to have a strength coach work with the team and build a program. Not only did we do the traditional football lifts like bench, squat, and power clings; but, with our strength coach, Rob Ripley, being a certified CrossFit coach, he gave the boys a lot of workouts they had never done before. We feel this helped them become stronger and develop muscles that will help keep them as injury-free as possible.”

The Falcons are a relatively young team this year with 35 freshmen and sophomores and just 14 juniors and seniors.

Henslin is hopeful that he and his coaching staff can “continue to build a culture that brings those kinds of numbers out for football.”

Others outside of Fountain Hills are starting to take notice of the Falcon team. Azcentral recently named Fountain Hills as one of the teams to look out for this season and four Falcons (Hafeez Momoh, Shane Davenport, Ahmed Momoh and Boden Davidson) have all appeared on lists of players to watch regardless of school size.

Henslin is aware that even with outside attention and buzz, nothing is guaranteed this season.

“Basically we still need to bring our best effort each week,” he said. “We were picked by Azcentral to win our region but nothing will be handed to us. We are going to have to fight for every win, including this Friday when we host the number one team in the state, Northwest Christian. We are still a little bitter about our five-point loss to NWC last year so we have some extra motivation to continue having people take notice of Fountain Hills football.”

The first football game of the season will be this Friday, Aug. 17, against Northwest Christian at Fountain Hills High School.