Arcadia pursues another crack at playoff football

In two decades with Derek Updike at the helm of the football program, the Arcadia Raiders have become a playoff regular when late October rolls around.

In the Raiders’ first 20 seasons under Updike — he served as head coach from 1999 to 2002 and has been in that role again since 2009 — they’ve made it to the postseason on 14 different occasions and have never gone more than two consecutive years without qualifying for the playoffs.

However, Arcadia is still on the hunt for its first postseason win of the 2020s and would certainly love to change that if they can navigate their way back to the playoffs yet again this fall.

That quest began in earnest with the first week of practice, where the Raiders (who have a turnout around 33 or 34 players this season) have the benefit of bringing back some key players that will help make for a smoother process this time of year.

Senior Max Blaschko returns after serving as the team’s workhorse running back last season, piling up 1,099 rushing yards and nine touchdowns while averaging 6.0 yards per carry. Blaschko was named to the All-Coulee first team as a running back and was a second-team selection on the defensive line.

Junior Carter Wegman returns as the starting quarterback for the Raiders following a sophomore campaign that saw him complete 52.9 percent of his passes while throwing for 1,206 yards, 15 touchdowns and 10 interceptions.

After a couple of years of dealing with youth and inexperience on both the offensive and defensive lines, Updike is excited to have a bit more continuity in the trenches going into this season and leaving less of a question mark there as the start of the schedule quickly approaches.

“It allows us to put that puzzle together quicker. Some years, you’re not really getting your starting group set up until about week three,” Updike said. “We feel like now, we can do our scrimmage and maybe rotate a lot in week one and then by week two be a little bit more understanding of who’s the starters on offense and who’s the starters on the defensive line.”

Ted Teske was the team’s leading receiver who is now gone to graduation. Updike envisions junior Jonah Slaby being a leader among the group looking to step up and fill that void in the receiving corps.

Defensively, Blaschko and Wegman are both expected to have big impacts and Updike expressed excitement at getting junior Logan Breska back at linebacker after he missed much of last season with a broken leg.

Defensive communication has been a point of emphasis for the team in practice after having it be an issue at times in 2024.

“As a defense, we’re kind of embarrassed to say we had a game last year where we lined up incorrectly defensively 17 out of 21 times during the first part of the game,” Updike said. “Not by a lot, but the alignment was not right. And when you don’t line up correctly, it’s kind of hard to stop them.”

Updike acknowledged that West Salem and La Crosse Aquinas are the “crème de la crème” of the Coulee Conference until proven otherwise, but he feels confident the Raiders are good enough to be right in that competitive battle of teams competing for a postseason trip.

“It’s gonna be a dogfight in there,” Updike said. “But we feel like we should be in that mix to make the playoffs, so that’s our goal.”