Old-school Stone Ridge Christian looking to repeat

The linemen at Stone Ridge Christian High School do just about everything together. It’s a close-knit unit the Knights hope will be the backbone of another run to a Sac-Joaquin Section championship.

“We’re really close,” senior William Vander Woude said. “We work together. We lift together. We eat together. We’re our own little group at school. We rely on each other.”

Vander Woude and Robbie McKee, Travis Hooker, Sybrand Vander Dussen and Luke Jenkins return as starters on the line with tight end Mark Hooker.

It’s their job to lead the way for Stone Ridge Christian’s ground-and-pound double-wing running attack. The Knights hope to pound teams into submission 3 and 4 yards at a time.

“That’s definitely the strength of our team,” said coach Art DeJager, who led the Knights to a Division VII section championship last season. “We don’t have a lot of skilled, blue-chip type of players. We don’t have incredible speed or athleticism. We do have a lot of toughness on our line. We’re going to ride the backs of our line on both sides of the ball.”

While many high schools are gravitating toward high-tempo, spread offenses with the goal of 40 to 50 passes per game, the Knights’ offense is old school. It’s power instead of finesse. It’s 3 yards and a cloud of dust.

“I love it,” Vander Woude said. “It’s so much fun. It might not be that much fun to watch, but boy, it’s fun to play. We condition for this offense. It’s fun to see opponents start fresh and then we grind away. We’re pushing them every play. By the fourth quarter, they are gassed. We’re also gassed, but we have the stamina for the fourth quarter.”

One question for the Knights is whether the returning players can turn the page from last year’s section title run. Are they ready to put in the work needed to repeat?

“It’s always different when you win a section title,” DeJager said. “It spoils you a bit. You feel satisfied. I think this group wants to continue. We’ve been telling them it’s much harder to defend a crown than chase the crown.”

The schedule is tough early, too. The Knights open against a much bigger El Capitan squad, followed by a game against always competitive Ripon Christian. El Capitan has its first senior class this season, faces Division III and IV schools in the Western Athletic Conference and will move up to the Central California Conference next season.

“Coming out of the gate is going to be really tough for us,” DeJager said. “El Cap is really a senior-laden team like us. They just have more numbers than we do. They have three or four at each position, and we have one or two. We’ve never faced a school anywhere as big as El Cap.

“Ripon Christian is always good. They’re tough competition. This is the third year we’ve faced them, and we haven’t beat them yet.”

The Knights have come a long way since the program went 0-10 in 2011. Vander Woude and the other seniors remember when the team wasn’t very good in 2012, winning just three games, but they knew the program was turning the corner when DeJager took over that season.

“We actually started acting like a football team,” Vander Woude said. “We were weightlifting and working in the offseason instead of just showing up when the season started and hoping we did something right.”

Now that the Knights have made it to the mountaintop, the goal is to stay there.

This story was originally published August 27, 2015 at 10:13 PM with the headline "Old-school Stone Ridge Christian looking to repeat."