Countdown to Kickoff 2023: D’Iberville Warriors

D’IBERVILLE, Miss. (WLOX) -The D’Iberville Warriors are heading into year two with head coach Josh Ladner.

He says among the lessons he learned in his first year as a head coach was to expect the unexpected and prepare as best you can.

“They’re only going to be as prepared as I am,” he said. “Lessons learned is there are some things that are so far out of your control and you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got and what you do have in your control you hope to limit anything else bad happening.”

Ladner says the biggest thing he wanted to work on this off season was tightening down the defense.

“That really has been my main focus. I know that a D’Iberville football team has a good running game, an opportunistic play action pass, solid special teams, and a ferocious defense,” said Ladner. “Where I feel like everything else was pretty close I felt like our defense really needed to step it up.

The Warriors bring back a number of starters on both sides of the ball in addition to more than a dozen seniors, including safety and running back Marquise Washington who says he’s been working on his conditioning in the offseason.

“Personally I wanted to work on my stamina, towards the end of games I would get tired sometimes but now we’ve been running a lot and it feels like we’re a lot more conditioned than last year,” said Washington. “Playing in this heat I feel like we’re ready for anything.”

For junior running back Andre Crosby he says he’s split his time working on his on the field and off the field performance this year.

“We didn’t have the physical last year so this year we focused on the physical,” said Crosby. “Last year we didn’t have that kind of leadership so this year we focused on a lot of those things.”

And Coach Ladner agrees, as he sees the leadership qualities of his team grows every day.

“All of them are great leaders and hard workers and that’s probably the biggest difference,” said Ladner. “This group as a whole wants to win and they’re willing to compete.”

The Warriors open up the season taking on Columbia.

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