Tigers' season starts Friday against Canyon Ridge

The Mountain Home Tigers open their football season at home Friday night against the Canyon Ridge Riverhawks at Tiger Field.

Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. at Tiger Field.

It is Blackout Night, with fans encouraged to wear black.

Halftime will also feature the Optimist Football teams and cheerleaders.

Aaron Rodney, who starts his third season as head coach of the Tigers, was pleased with this year's turnout.

"Going into year three, this is the most that we've had," the coach said. "We started out with close to 90, and have had about 10 kids that have quit already, and that's to be expected -- you have some attrition there, so we're holding 80 to 83, freshmen through seniors. Three years ago I had 67, so this is exactly where we want to be with the numbers and our staff and the size of school that we have. This is a good number for us, it's manageable."

The Tigers held their annual Black-White scrimmage last Friday night to cap off their Fall Camp. Coach Rodney was pleased with their efforts.

"We looked really well. The thing I'm most impressed with is the kids played really hard and they competed. When we do this scrimmage, it's a JV -- varsity scrimmage, so we split up the JV and varsity guys equally, and we get our quarterbacks some looks and things like that.

"I thought we executed well offensively, and defensively, later in the scrimmage we executed well. There's some things we've got to clean up, so we'll look at the tape tomorrow and see where we're at with those types of things. We asked the kids to play hard and compete, and I think they did that.

"You can't teach that -- that comes from within -- and I thought they did a good job. The rest -- the Xs and Os -- the taking care of the mistakes and stuff, we can clean that up.

"Coming out of Fall Camp, for the most part, we're pretty healthy. This is a good way to end it. We pushed them really hard for two weeks, and the kids came out tonight and played really well, so we feel pretty good about it right now, so we'll see how this all unfolds."

Coach Rodney is looking forward to opening the season Friday against Canyon Ridge.

"We had a chance to look at them at Summer Camp and they've got some good players," he said.

"They're physical up front and their coach was the offensive coordinator at Caldwell, so he's going to bring that offense over, which they ran it pretty good," Rodney said. "It's going to be a challenge for us, but one that I think our guys are excited about. We're looking to get this thing going right."