MUNFORD — William Wagnon’s first spring practice gave him a glance of what areas the Munford Lions are going to have to work on as they prepare for fall. Overall Wagnon was pleased on how his team got better everyday during spring training.

“It went pretty well, Wagnon said. “We are not where we need to be, and we are not where I want us to be. I do feel like we got better each day that we were out there. We had some good days and we had some bad days, but in some aspect in the game of football we got better as we continued to practice. We got some time to evaluate these kids and see how they could play and who wasn’t quite ready yet.”

There is a current of excitement around the Lions’ football program since Wagnon accepted the job just over two months ago. Last season numbers wise Munford looked as if they were a 1A team as they only had 25 players. Wagnon addressed that problem as soon as he got the job as he began to invite students to play football.

“We started out with 85 in the beginning of spring and ended up with 70 on varsity,” Wagnon said. “What I came in to do is to sell this program and invite kids to play. We went around and we basically asked kids to play. We made it kind of strict in the off-season you had to make three workouts, but all the kids that wanted to play this year made their workouts. Another thing that helped was they went from 10 through 12th grade and we went ninth through 12th grade and that helped a little bit too.”

The passion for football in a community like Munford is what really made Wagnon interested in the coaching job.

“When I saw the job posted I looked at it and I didn’t know about it honestly,” Wagnon said. “I talked to some people in the community and the community was so excited about Munford football still even though all the program had been through. They were still so excited about Munford football. I just came down, looked around, researched it and I just fell in love. I love it here; these kids are great kids too. It has a strong football tradition and the community is 100 percent behind them. In Cherokee County we won state championships, so the community will be behind us. These guys haven’t been as satisfied with what happened in football, but they are still 100 percent behind the program and I thought this is somewhere I wanted to be.”

Wagnon doesn’t believe that wins and losses will not determine how successful the Lions will be this up coming season.

“A lot of success is built of wins and losses,” Wagnon said. “Right now we want to set a plan and work the plan. If we set a plan and work the plan, wins and losses will take care of themselves. Basically, we just want to get better everyday and get to our goal and our plan on what we want to run on defense; how we want to do this and how we want to do that and work the plan. Once we get the plan in and established, then we will start worrying about wins and losses.”

Winning is all that Wagnon has experienced over the past two seasons. During the last two seasons Cherokee County posted a record of 30-1, with two state championship appearances, including winning the Class 3A championship last year. For Wagnon, he has scaled his expectations back some, but he plans to have them at a high level soon.

“Coming in my last 31 ball games we won 30 of them,” Wagnon said. “I’m not used to losing, I have never been use to losing and I don’t like losing. This is a totally different situation from where I was. It is a different place, different kids. We can’t expect the same results out of these kids starting this year as we would. We are going to but this is a difference group of kids. We are going to do a lot of the same things that were successful in the past in Cherokee County that won state championships, we are bringing that here and trying to instill that here. We want to win a state championship this year, but is that too high of a goal maybe, but we are still going to set that as one of our goals. One thing that we did this spring, I got with the seniors during spring training and said our major goal this season is to make the playoffs. Once we make the playoffs then we can set a higher goal. Last year at Centre our major goal was to win the state championship, because we went to the state champion game before. We have to pull back a little bit here at Munford and just make the playoffs. Then we can move our goal to making to the second round, third round, fourth round. Our goal are a little bit smaller here, but the main outcome we want to be the same.”

One of the things that Wagnon will try to do turn a once competitive rivalry with Lincoln around. The Lions have lost the past seven years to the Golden Bears, which included a 47-point thrashing last season.

“It’s huge,” Wagnon said of the rivalry. “From day one that was one of the things that I heard how are you going to beat Lincoln? Lincoln is just another opponent on the schedule. Do we want to beat them bad? Yes we want to beat them in every thing we play, but we are going to take that game like every other game it is a must win situation. If we approach every game like we approach Lincoln I think we will be successful too. These kids got it in their minds about Lincoln and that’s great, but I want us to focus on every game.”