WINFIELD, W.Va. — The Winfield football program could become one of the biggest beneficiaries from the statewide re-classification that begins in August.
One of nine AAA schools making the drop to Class AA, Winfield had climbed into AAA in 2008 where it never made the playoffs.
“It has been kind of a shot in the arm,” said Winfield coach Craig Snyder. “We don’t have to play the big daddies anymore. We get to play schools that are our size and a little bit smaller, actually. We like what we have coming back and I’m pretty optimistic.”
Winfield’s enrollment will be the second-largest in the new-look Class AA, behind only Lincoln County.
“What I want to convince our guys of is that they will have a target on their backs, because we used to be AAA,” Snyder said. “They will all want a piece of us and we saw a little bit of that during 7-on-7s. But if we have the same work ethic in AA that we had in AAA, I think we can win some more football games.”
The Generals will go from playing in the ultra-competitive Mountain State Athletic Conference to one of Class AA’s strongest leagues, the Cardinal Conference.
“We used to be in the Cardinal Conference,” Snyder said. “I’ve been coaching at Winfield since 2000 and my first eight years we were Class AA. I was an assistant and about half of the time we were a playoff team. There is excellent football in the Cardinal Conference, it’s a physical league.
“We’re kind of going back to our old rivalries.”
Winfield, which finished 4-6 in 2015, will have a solid core of returning players, beginning with 6-foot-3 junior quarterback Andrew Huff who has started since the middle of his freshman year.
Seniors Chris Farha and Luke Oshel, along with junior Brian Fisher give Huff multiple receiving options who have size and good hands. Running backs/linebackers Isaac Withrow and Ethan Copeland have both graduated, but the Generals return a lot of strength up front.
“We have all of our offensive linemen back,” Snyder said. “We were pretty solid up front, especially the second half of the year. We think that will carry over and be the strength of our team. We’re very excited about what we have back there.”
The Generals open up the season at home against rival Hurricane and then play their first conference matchup at home against Scott.