Turnout for Tiger football double what it was last year

The Mountain Home Tigers head into the 2006 football season with plenty of optimism.

What has Mountain Home Tiger head football coach Brian smiling is the numbers out for football this year.

Coach Floyd and his staff have issued football gear for 80 players, up from 39 last year.

"We've almost doubled our turnout, which is really nice, but a lot of it has to do with last year's senior class when we only had four kids come out. We did get a lot more kids out and a lot of them attended our camp, and the camp was a huge success for us, so we're pretty excited."

Floyd said they had 33 freshmen out so far to push their total numbers for the football program in grades nine through 12 to around 115, and he expects they will get more freshman out when school starts.

"It's the first time since I've been here that we've had a true JV, varsity and freshman squad, and this is also the first year that we don't have freshmen and sophomores on the varsity. That's the kind of depth we have on the varsity level, and on the JV, we have about 10 juniors right now, so we're solid, and that's good to see."

What also has Coach Floyd smiling is the amount of experience this year's Tiger varsity squad has.

"We have a ton (of experience) on offense. We have basically nine starters back that started games last year. Colby Lord stepped in at center with three games to go last year, so he has three games under his belt, so I included him in the nine starters on offense, and we have eight starters back on defense, which is very nice, and a lot of those are in their third year of starting -- I'd say five or six will be in their third year of starting.

"For (Tyson) Sessions, it's his fourth year starting -- so we have experience, we have depth, and for the first time, we even have depth at quarterback, and you'll see that in the first couple of games."

The Tigers open their season on Sept. 1 at Bronco Stadium in Boise against the Boise Braves. Their first home game is Sept. 8 against the Vallivue Falcons. They open their conference season the following week at home against Skyview.

The new Nampa school, Columbia, and Middleton replace Vallivue and Caldwell in the SIC 4A. Vallivue and Caldwell both moved up to 5A.