CHESTER — The past three seasons have ended abruptly for the Chester-Joplin-Inverness football team, losing in the 6-Man quarterfinals each of the past three fall slates.
Nonetheless, the team has still been in the mix at the top of the classification and sees itself being right back up there once again.
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"We're ready, we just want to play a game so bad," senior Cooper Streit said during Tuesday's practice. "We can practice an entire another month and I don't think we'd be more ready than now."
"Getting faster, stronger and kind of have the mentality just to go through, like push," senior Ryland St. John said. "Because we haven't really finished where we wanted to the last few seasons. Feel like this is the year we got to prove everyone wrong."
Streit and St. John are the lone seniors on this roster of Hawks, and coach Jim Vinson said both have done a great job of leading the charge thus far.
"Both of them are all-state football players last year," Vinson said. "Ryland St. John was an all-state basketball player last year, and I believe Cooper Streit was an all-state basketball player. They both had great track seasons and put together a solid summer of workouts in the gym, and in the weight room, and out on the football field."
What's been seen in practice has pleased Vinson, he said.
"We're as far as we've been since we've made the move to 6-Man football for where we are at in the season right now," Vinson said.
C-J-I will be tested greatly in its first couple contests. It starts on the road against Hot Springs — a semifinal playoff team from last fall — and comes home Week 2 for Denton-Geyser-Stanford-Geraldine — which appeared in the quarterfinals.
"These are big games, these are statement games," Streit said. "Show some resilience and just be a team together, and just show what we can do."
"I think it's important," St. John said. "It will tell us where we're at and just tell us what we need to fix out of conference, but it doesn't matter. Still got to bring it."
"I love how they do that in 6-Man football because we will be challenged both weeks," Vinson said.
Streit and St. John have sights set high, they said.
"We want to win a state championship," Streit said. "That's been on our minds since last year — last three years — but something feels different this year."
"I think we're capable of everything," St. John said. "We just got to take it week-by-week and hopefully the end result is what we want."
The Hawks begin the 2025 fall campaign at Hot Springs on Friday at 7 p.m.
