2025 RECORD OVERALL RECORD: 6-5 DISTRICT RECORD: 2-3
Cayuga WILDCATS
Joe Elerson
Sports Writer sports @ palestineherald. com
A 6-5 season for the Cayuga Wildcats had Head Football Coach Jacob Magee pleased with how the team handled the year.
“ I feel like we still had some adversity that we dealt with this past season,” Magee said.“ We changed some things in some district ballgames that gave us a better seed and gave us an opportunity to maybe go further but that is football.”
For the second straight season, the Wildcats lost in the bi-district round to No. 4-ranked Axtell
“ I feel like we are closing the gap of not just being in the playoffs, but being a year in and year out competitor in the first two or three rounds,” Magee said.“ We want to be a competitive program and we will be attacking some mental areas to get past the first round.”
Magee said 2025 had a lot of positives in terms of the offensive and defensive side of the ball.
On offense, the Wildcats had solid season from junior quarterback Kase Dickson. He was 67-of-143 passing for 1,247 yards with 14 touchdowns and eight interceptions. He also ran for 325 yards and five touchdowns.
Magee said this was the first time Cayuga has had a player throw for more than 1,000 yards in a season.
“ It is exciting because this is the fifth year I have been here and we have never thrown for 1,000 yards,” Magee said.“ For Kase to throw for nearly 1,300 that was creeping in on the school record. He was 500 yards away from that record. We had three games where we weren’ t throwing it as much. It is big for Kase to come back with a lot of varsity games in his bag.”
Defensively, the Wildcats gave up 187 points in 11 games and was led by the District Defensive Most Valuable Player in senior Hayden Schranck. Overall,
Schranck finished the year with 93 tackles, which was second on the team and had a team-high nine sacks.
“ I think the proudest one is we are a fourth place team and we get the Defensive MVP of the district. That speaks volumes for what he did,” Magee said.“ It is a pretty good season and that is really good defense. You see more kids get defensive honors and they did a great job this year.”
Magee said even with the loss of key players on offense and defense, he is expecting to find four guys on offense and defense this offseason.
“ We have seven guys coming back on defense and we feel like we need to find four guys for defense,” Magee said.“ We lose three offensive linemen and we
12 WINTER EDITION 2026