BY IVAN SANDERS

STAR STAFF

ivan.sanders@elizabethton.com

Coming into the 2019 football season, the Unaka Rangers realized that one of their primary focus would be finding the right fit to go take over the quarterback slot that was left vacant when John Ramsey graduated last year.

Unaka head coach O’Brien Bennett would be the first one to admit that you cannot just replace a signal-caller like Ramsey who garnered All-State his junior and senior year as a Ranger.

“Replacing John Boy is going to be tough,” Bennett said. “I won’t say we are going to replace him necessarily. We are going to be different with our identity as a team.

“I don’t know that you can replace him because he is a college-level quarterback, but we have two guys competing right now and we are probably going to use them both because they have two completely different skill sets.

“One of those guys is sophomore Daniel Shearl,” Bennett continued. “Last year, as a freshman he recorded six interceptions from his free safety position and we only moved him at safety halfway through the season.

“He’s a very good athlete. He’s a baseball player that has a good arm. Daniel is also a smart kid who has picked up the offense and being as athletic as he is, he gives us the ability to do a lot of things offensively.”

Another player competing is someone who was able to have a close relationship with John Ramsey and that is his brother, Landon, who Bennett has high expectations for.

“Landon is a very intelligent young man who is going to be a very good football player,” Bennett added. “He is a freshman and when you ask a freshman to step out on the football field and be a leader, it’s tough.

“We will probably use them both to highlight what we want to accomplish over the course of the week or over the course of the drive and take advantage of what our opponents give us.

“We want to put them in position to be successful,” Bennett continued. “We are not going to ask them to replace John Boy, we want Landon to be Landon and we don’t want Daniel to be John Boy, we want him to be Daniel.

“We are working on teaching them to be more than throwers. They are both baseball players and accomplished baseball players. But we want to develop into passers and coaches on the field who can distribute the football to our playmakers correctly. We tell our quarterbacks that we want them to be on time on target.”

For Bennett, the offseason has been excellent and said that the Rangers are buying into the process.

The head coach has been preaching that it’s going to take time to build the program to the level they want to be, but that comes with hard work and there hasn’t been a lack of that as the kids have worked extremely hard for the upcoming season.