Kiefer, Hawks persevere

If there is one guarantee in high school athletics, it’s that things change.

For the Lakeland football team, there was a lot of that this season.

The perennial 3A powerhouse that took third place in the state two years ago endured a lackluster campaign a year ago and has two wins this season. The raucous green-and-yellow home crowd that has always rivaled that of larger schools has dwindled to the point where the band practically outnumbers the fans.

Add the fact that participation has waned to emergency levels in this, a year that the Hawks made the jump to 4A, in which competition is tougher than most years.

But anybody who has attended a Lakeland game this year has seen that senior quarterback Kam Kiefer and the Hawks are resolute in firing off every snap as if a state berth were on the line.

“We have a pretty proud tradition,” Kiefer said. “But it’s been a different experience. With 20 kids, it’s kind of hard to do stuff that you need to do.

“But everybody on this team plays as hard as they can. They’re just a great group of guys.”

For those who truly love sport, there are victories even in defeat.

“I’ve been on varsity for the last three years, and this is probably the closest-knit team I’ve been on,” said Kiefer, who along with everybody in the Lakeland football program boarded a charter bus and took in the movie “Friday Night Lights” on Monday. “We hang out on the weekend and things like that.

“If nothing else, we just like to hang out with each other.”

Kiefer, who points to 2002 as the highlight of his football career, also starts for and captains the Lakeland basketball team, which went undefeated in the Intermountain League last season.

He said to look for good things from this year’s Hawks basketball team, which he called “small, but quick,” but stops short of letting conversation shift elsewhere when there is still football to be played.

“You can’t look past this last game,” said Kiefer, who plans to attend North Idaho College this fall and possibly walk on somewhere and play football at the end of two years. “It’s not the year that I would have envisioned when I was a sophomore.

“But it was a great season to make friends, and everyone kept on trying their hardest; you have to give them props for that.”