Us Against the World

Inside The Rock

Mountaineer Fans and House United family, welcome back to ‘Inside the Rock’, a behind-the-scenes blog on App State Football. For those of you that are new, my name is Trey Schaneville and I am a graduate transfer kicker for your Mountaineers, and I am excited to share my experiences within the App State football program with you. Be sure to subscribe to Houseunitedsports.com to never miss a blog, and to be notified of upcoming promotions and events.

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Us Against the World

Disappointing loss last Tuesday night in Louisiana. Not much to say about it. I know, my teammates know, our coaches know, and our fans know that we are capable of playing much better than that. With that being said, our championship hopes are still very much alive and in our control. And, as I mentioned in the previous blog, we expect nothing less. En route to anything worth celebrating, there will be adversity. Right now, we are facing adversity, but how will we respond? How do champions respond?

We kickoff Wednesday night at The Rock against the 14th ranked team in the country, Coastal Carolina. It’s the first time since 2014 that App State is entering a home game as the underdog. We don’t feel like the underdogs, but we are definitely embracing it and taking on the challenge. For us, considering the opponent, it wasn’t hard to come up with the motivation we needed to be fully prepared for Wednesday night, as the stakes are clear. A win against Coastal Carolina will be a huge step toward our goal as conference champions, and a potential rematch against Louisiana in the conference championship.

Coming off of a disappointing performance last week, the focus for us is to learn from our mistakes, and refuse to make the same ones again. After Alabama’s loss to Texas A&M this past weekend, Nick Saban said, “never waste a failure”. Yes, we failed last week. But, the key is to learn from it and then move on to the next one. We spent the whole day after the game watching film in order to see where we made mistakes, both as a team and individually. When those meetings were over, we put that loss and those mistakes behind us and turned our focus on Coastal.

Throughout this week of preparation, the focus has been on bringing energy. Bringing energy to every practice, every meeting, and every workout. That is easy to do when you are winning, but it is challenging to muster up enthusiasm when you’re coming off of a tough loss. However, the coaches have stressed the importance of consistency all year long, and now is not the time to take our foot off the gas pedal. Coach Clark got the energy going in our first team meeting in preparation for Coastal. We walked in to some loud music over the speakers, and finished the meeting off with some more music. For some reason, music always seems to get the guys juiced up a little more than usual, and it definitely created a sense of liveliness and excitement that was missing before the meeting started. That meeting, in my opinion, set the tone and got us really excited for Coastal Carolina, which generated a week of practice that was full of energy.

Another theme this past week has been the “us against the world mentality”. Other than the guys in this locker room, no one thinks we have a chance on Wednesday night. But, who cares? Who cares what anybody else has to say about our team and this program. They don’t know what it took to get to where we are. They don’t know about the countless early mornings, the 3 hour practices, or the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that have been shed for each other. We’ve gone too far and done too much to just say “yeah, we got our butts whooped last week and Coastal Carolina is the 14th ranked team in the country, I think we’ll just wrap it up here.” No, we put our horse blinders on, kept working, and ignored the outside criticism. The only thing that matters is us, because it’s us against the world.