Cossacks close regular season with road victory

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GARRETSON – Sioux Valley closed out the regular season with a 14-3 victory over Garretson Friday night.

The Cossacks finished the regular season with a record of 7-1 and earned the No. 4 seed in the Class 11B Playoffs. They host No. 13 Chamberlain (2-5) in the first round Thursday night.

The Cossacks held the Blue Dragons to 98 total yards of offense on the night. Garretson had negative-2 yards passing and 100 yards rushing.

Sioux Valley head coach Dan Hughes said the defense played a major part in the Cossacks’ victory.

“Defense played outstanding. Coach [Jordan] Fast did outstanding, getting them in position and where they needed to be to make plays on D. Dylen Milton had a nice interception at a crucial time. Very proud of the defense,” he added.

Mckade Rentsch got the scoring going for Sioux Valley on a 3-yard touchdown run with 4:34 left in the first quarter. He then ran in the two-point conversion to make it 8-0.

Garretson kicked a field goal with 3:07 left in the first half.

The Cossacks put the game out of reach with 9:56 left in the fourth quarter when Parker Puetz had 1-yard scoring plunge to make it 14-3.

The Cossacks had 285 yards of offense – 234 of them came on the ground.

Jaxton Schiller ran the ball 11 times for 78 yards. Rentsch had 63 yards on 20 carries and Connor Logan had eight carries for 50 yards.

Puetz went 3-for-7 for 51 yards and Carson Christopherson had one catch for 40 yards.

Even with those statistics, Hughes was a little unhappy with his offense’s performance.

“It seemed like every time we had a big play the penalty flags came. So we have to look at that and clean that up. I don’t want to guess how many penalty yards we had on offense, but when it takes away 50-yard runs and moves it back 10 yards from the line of scrimmage, that’s huge. Those are game-changing penalties and we had three or four of them tonight,” he said.

The playoffs are next.

“We’re feeling good,” Hughes said. “We’re healthy. We played another tough game tonight against a conference opponent. We’re happy with the win we’re going to enjoy it. As far as the playoffs go, we’re going to take it one game at a time. We have a goal and we just have to take it one game at a time and give it our best shot.”