The Cheyenne Mountain Red-tailed Hawks varsity football team went 8-3 last season and earned a berth into the Class 4A state playoffs. This year, Cheyenne Mountain is 3-3, looking to snap a two-game slide Friday against Rampart.

Head coach Jay Saravis weighed in with thoughts on his team and the upcoming game:

Cheyenne Mountain has had a great record the past two seasons. This year has been a bit of a rougher start. What’s been different for this team so far this season?

We’ve had some very tough competition this year. As I said I’ve had some kids on my team that have been sick for the last few weeks. But really the level of competition has been excellent, and we really have to do a better job playing four complete quarters.

You’re in a new league this year. How does switching make things different for your coaching staff?

A lot of the teams in our league are carrying 60, 70 kids on varsity. We’re still at about 30. So as far as numbers, they have a lot more numbers than we do, but then again, in practice our kids get a lot of work, which is good.

Talk to me about last week’s game against Air Academy. You made a huge comeback in the third quarter, but fell just short. What did you think about that performance?

(Air Academy is) a very well-coached team. They run their system to a T very nicely. We all know that they have a heck of a running back. We just didn’t put together four quarters and tackling hurt us in this game. Sam Beers is the type of kid you can’t tackle him up high. He’s never going to go up high, so we lost a lot of opportunities we should have had. We didn’t get an offensive play until two minutes left in the first quarter, because they scored and, you know, next kickoff they get an onside kick on us and they recovered again. So they had a lot of time of possession. Once we were able to get the ball and do what we do in the second half, we started putting points on the board, but shame on us for not taking advantage of opportunities.

How has the result of that game affected practice this week?

The difference between the Cheyenne Mountain teams of this year and the two years past from what I’ve heard before that, these kids are resilient. They don’t give up and they keep playing hard. So we’re just going to keep gunning and plugging away and put together four quarters and it’s going to be impressive.

Looking ahead to Rampart what challenges do they present for your team?

This is a very, very tough aggressive football team. It’s one of those things you can’t give them an inch because they will take a mile. We’ve got to just go nose-to-nose with them and just keep playing hard. And as I said put together four solid quarters of good football. That we know we’re capable of.

Talk to me about preparing for the challenge of facing two quarterbacks as opposed to just one?

Well one’s a lefty, one’s a righty and you watch them on film, you see if they do anything different with each kid. They both like to run. They both throw a decent ball. That’s only one kid. There’s an entire offensive line, there’s an entire aggressive defense, there’s more kids to worry about. They have a nice big-sized receiver.

What are your keys to success?

Probably playing mistake-free football. We don’t shoot ourselves in the foot. So we’ve had a couple games this year where we’ll be driving the ball and we’ll have two or three penalties that will kill our drive. Or we played some games where we had another team stopped and then we would go offsides and keep their drives preserved, or a holding call at the worst point.